Presidential Deal (12 page)

Linda too was gazing up at the shadowy figure, and he could see the realization already forming on her face. Whatever order she had recognized in the universe before, whatever logic, whatever reason, it was about to disappear for good.

Chapter 18

“Yo, Dedric!” Driscoll called.

Dedric Bailey, chief of the city’s Special Investigative Section, glanced up from his desk, the phone tucked under his ear, saw who it was. “Yes,” he said into the phone. “Of course. Every single man. Around the clock. Absolutely. Count on it.” He hung up the phone, watched Driscoll approach.

“You want your job back?” Bailey asked. Bailey, a black man, was in his early fifties. Normally he looked ten years younger. Today, it was the other way around.

“No thanks,” Driscoll said. “It’d screw up my pension.” Actually, Driscoll had spent most of his time in Homicide. Aside from the occasional special assignment, he had never worked directly for Bailey, who commanded the more specialized units: Intelligence, Narcotics, the Bomb and Counterterrorism squads. Still, they’d maintained a friendship over the years: Driscoll had always admired Bailey’s unruffled approach, just as Bailey seemed to appreciate Driscoll’s own steadiness.

Driscoll glanced around the room. Pretty much as he remembered: same battered furniture, same pale green walls, a shade paler with age, same framed commendations that marked the passage of years. There was a picture of Bailey and his wife and son on a shelf behind the desk, picture taken on a college campus somewhere, or so it seemed. Three happy people in a part of the world where logic held sway.

The very notion made Driscoll think of Deal. He tried to tell himself his friend had walked away from all the chaos at the Hyatt, like that Bridges character in the movie about the plane crash. Sure. Deal was sitting in a bar having a couple of drinks. He’d turn up. All this worry for nothing. This nosing around the department, this grave he’d already climbed out of once. Go home, Driscoll. Find Deal loopy drunk on the steps. On the other hand, keep looking for bad news like he was, he was sure to find it.

“We could use you,” Bailey was saying. He sighed, leaned back in his swivel chair, rubbed his face with his hands.

“You look like shit,” Driscoll said.

“Thanks,” Bailey said. “Sit down. I’ve got about ten seconds.”

Driscoll took a seat in a battered gray side chair with stuffing poking out of the armrest. He gestured at the phone Bailey had been using when he’d walked in. “You mustering the Antiterrorist Unit for the feds?”

Bailey scoffed. “Yeah, I got ’em out there directing traffic.”

“Come on.”

“You know how the Feds are. They know everything, we don’t know shit. Give ’em a couple a days to decide which agency is going to be in charge, they’ll come ask us if any of us nappy-headed boys know anything. Only by then, anything we have will be stone cold, right?”

Driscoll nodded.

“You remember the Echeverria case, the guy who’d been at the Bay of Pigs, him and his wife got machine-gunned in front of their house down in Kendall?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He’d been sending balloons over Cuba, dropping these leaflets, ‘Kill Castro,’ and all that.”

It was gradually sinking in with Driscoll. “So what’s the point?”

“Point is, that’s the last major case I worked with the Feds. We’re stymied on the thing, we discover the guy’s got a safe in his house, we get the paperwork done, go out there to open it, see if there’s anything inside that might help. I find a couple of suits from Langley waiting there. They tell me, we’re going to look at everything comes out of that safe first. We’ll decide what’s related to your case and pass it along. What’s sensitive to our interests, we’ll maintain control of. They took a couple of cartons away, they gave me a notepad and a couple of bank statements. Couple of weeks later, they turned over some things might have helped, but whoever did it was long gone. We never did solve the case.”

Bailey shook his head, seeming to drift off down the long line of the memory he’d unearthed.

“So you got no word on the First Lady?” Driscoll asked, bringing him back.

“Nada,” Bailey said, glancing up at him. “Gone without a trace. Nobody knows if by land or by sea. The only thing they’re fairly sure about is nobody noticed any helicopters or airplanes take off from the roof of the Hyatt.”

“No one’s taken responsibility?”

Bailey shook his head. “There was some bullshit communiqué, signed by an unknown group.”

“You have any ideas?”

Bailey gave him a mirthless laugh. “Somebody who’s well versed, that’s all I know.”

“What’s the Counterterrorism Unit say? That’s still Martinez’s bailiwick, isn’t it?”

Bailey nodded. “There’s half a dozen groups operating out of South-America who have the capability. But there’s no skinny on the street.”

“Maybe they came from another part of the world,” Driscoll said. “Middle East? Europe?”

“Maybe,” Bailey said. “Maybe it was aliens.” He shrugged wearily. “Unless somebody comes forward, we could be in for the long haul. You know how it goes. Footwork city.”

Driscoll nodded. “I was down at the hotel. I saw as much as the
federales
would let me.”

“Glad you went?” Bailey asked him. He’d rocked forward in his chair again. His eyes were bloodshot, his normally gleaming skin a sallow shade, Driscoll thought. Or maybe it was just the light. He’d forgotten how shitty the light was in the offices. You didn’t have eye problems when you came in, you sure as hell would after twenty-five years.

“I wouldn’t’ve believed it,” Driscoll said. “Not if you called and told me about it yourself, Dedric.” Bad as a plane crash. Worse, in some ways, knowing there wasn’t anything accidental about it.

“We got fifty-nine dead, another two hundred in the hospital, and nobody knows what that shit they turned loose does to you. Maybe the ones that went down with the gas are gonna wake up, maybe not, maybe they’re gonna grow feathers if they do.” Bailey turned away, his face bitter.

“I wish to Christ I’d retired when you did, Vernon. We could be out in a boat somewhere in the Everglades, grabbing snapper, we’d never even know this happened.”

“Right, Dedric. See where
I
am?”

Bailey turned back, gave Driscoll a snort that was supposed to be a laugh. “Why
are
you here, Vernon? Retired but you can’t stay away from the big ones? That’s head-case city, my man.”

Driscoll opened his hands, the mini-version of his shrug.
Tell the man, Vernon. If he’s got the news you’re after, all this can end
.

He looked at Bailey. “Same people do the plane, you figure?”

“Makes sense,” Bailey said, shrugging. “We hear ‘bomb explosion at the airport,’ what do you think’s gonna happen? Half our guys, more actually, go right out of downtown for the airport. Same thing with the Feds. Bunch of them out to MIA, another bunch down to Homestead where
Air Force One
is standing by, another bunch gotta zoom up to Turnberry where the President’s giving Vas a hand job.”

“Then they turn the gas loose out in front, that distracts the rest,” Driscoll said.

Bailey nodded. “You know they chained the auditorium doors shut?”

Driscoll shook his head. “I hadn’t heard about that,” he said.

Bailey stared hard at him and Driscoll noticed that his eyes were glassy, the rims an even deeper red than he’d thought. Exhaustion? Anger? Anguish?

“What really aches my ass, Vernon, is the thought of these assholes being in uniform, you know? Imagine you’re sitting there in some auditorium feeling good about life and the world and even law and order and suddenly here come a bunch of miserable sonsofbitches who look like cops, opening up on you. How would you feel about that?”

Driscoll tried to imagine it, but he knew he couldn’t feel it the way Bailey meant. Deal had, though. That much he knew. He found himself thinking of Janice and Isabel. Even if he could find them, what was he going to say when he called?
Say, Janice, we got good news and bad news
…

“All those decent people,” Bailey said. “It was nothing but a goddamned slaughter. They wanted to take the woman, why didn’t they just take her? Why’d they have to do this?”

Driscoll looked back at Bailey. They’d worked Homicide together maybe fifteen years, he’d never seen the guy as much as wince. Lot of people, Driscoll’s ex-wife among them, claimed police work made you hard, cut off your access to your more tender sensibilities. Maybe he ought to bring Marie down to headquarters, let her take a look at Dedric Bailey, about to come to pieces, scatter all over his desk.

“Why do they blow up airplanes?” Driscoll said. “Why do they kill babies, grandmothers, pregnant women? Day I figure it out, Dedric, I am going to get myself a talk show and become rich.”

Bailey nodded, staring at Driscoll as if he were actually considering his wisdom, but Driscoll knew better. The man was already sidetracked, enough bullshit with a former booze hound and ex-member of the team, time now to go back to the present, stop whining, go to work, try to accomplish something, chip away at the vague helplessness that gnawed at anybody with a brain in law enforcement, no matter how gung ho you might be, like running toward a fire carrying a bucket of water with a hole in it—you knew the basic absurdity of the situation, but how could you not keep running?

“Yeah, well…” Bailey had his hands on his desk now, ready to heave himself up, go find somebody to chew on. “My ass is in a major sling here, Vernon. Something specific bring you by?”

Driscoll nodded. No time left. No more dodging the issue. He took a breath that sounded like a sigh. “It’s a little crazy at the hospitals, you know. There was a friend of mine in the room, at least I’m pretty sure he was. I thought maybe you’d have a better list…”

He trailed off. Why couldn’t he just come right out and tell Bailey what he was afraid of? He’d been a Homicide detective for almost twenty years. How many dead people had he seen?

“What I got is a list of the deceased, Vernon. Minus the names of the Feds, of course. They’re not giving that to me or anybody else.”

Driscoll nodded. “I know what you have.”

Bailey stared at him a minute, finally understood. He took a breath, rummaged around the papers on his desk. “What’s this person’s name?” he asked. He didn’t look up, Driscoll noticed.

“Deal,” Driscoll said. His voice sounded hollow in his ears. “John Deal.”

Bailey looked up this time. “That’s the local guy who was getting a medal, right?”

Driscoll nodded.

Bailey paused. “Weren’t you on that boat with him? How come you didn’t get a medal?”

“It’s a long story, Dedric,” Driscoll said, absently fingering the scar on his forehead. “Under the circumstances, I’m not unhappy about it.”

Dedric nodded. “So this Deal was a friend of yours?”

“I worked the Thornton Penfield case way back when, Deal was the first guy we went after.”

Bailey nodded, but it was clear his mind had drifted elsewhere once again. “I knew his old man,” Driscoll said. “I rent an apartment from Deal now. We drink some beer.”

Bailey bent back to his list, his jaw set firmly now.
We drink some beer
, Driscoll thought. Like code talk between old drunks. If it was a woman they’d been discussing, it would have been as if Driscoll had told Bailey: “We’re in love.”

Bailey flipped his list over, then back again. He glanced up at Driscoll, a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “Name’s not here, Driscoll. You sure he’s not in the hospital somewhere?”

Driscoll shrugged. “Maybe. It’s pretty crazy at the hospitals, like I said.”

“Maybe he just walked away after it was over,” Bailey said.

Driscoll gave him a stare of his own. “Were they just letting people stroll away from the scene?”

Bailey seemed annoyed now, all his compassion used up, his patience going with it. “It was pretty crazy there, Vernon, that much I can tell you. I’ll get something coherent from the hospitals pretty soon. I’ll check that over, give you a call if you like.”

“Sure, Dedric. You got a lot to do, though.”

“I said I’d call you, Vernon. He’ll turn up.”

“I appreciate it,” Driscoll said. He was nodding agreement with Bailey, both of them up and walking toward the door now, Driscoll trying to ignore the troubling thought that had occurred to him.

“They took the First Lady,” he said, stopping Bailey at the door. “What if they took John Deal, too?”

Bailey stared at him. “He’s just a citizen. Why the hell would they do that, Driscoll?”

“I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “But it could’ve happened.”

“So what?” Bailey said. His mind was clearly elsewhere now, Driscoll thought. Couldn’t blame him for that.

“So what if they did?” Bailey repeated.

Driscoll stared back at him as if the answer were obvious. “Then I’d have to find him, that’s all.”

Chapter 19

“Shall I apologize for the accommodations?” the tall man said. He had swung easily down through the hatch to stand atop them. Though his face was still shadowed, Deal could see that he was Latin, with fine features and a fair complexion.

The man didn’t seem concerned that they’d worked their blindfolds off, or that neither of them responded to his statement. He dropped into a crouch, his face a couple of feet from Deal’s. The boat’s speed had dropped off, and the roar of the engines had abated.

They were off plane now, and Deal felt the wallow of the hull in the water just beneath him. Heading in, he thought, whoever was at the wheel lining up a path toward channel markers, or, more likely, getting ready to pick a passage over shallows or through a reef. These boats, for all their size and speed, didn’t draw much water. He didn’t suppose there were many islands, even the least among the thousands dotting the waters of the Caribbean, that they couldn’t approach. He tried to calculate just how far they might have traveled, but without knowing how long he’d been unconscious, it was a hopeless task. It was only fifty miles to Bimini, little more than an hour’s run in a Cigarette. Another half-hour and the possibilities for landfall grew exponentially, became virtually limitless.

He’d like to think there was some chance they’d been tracked, that even now a great flotilla of rescue ships and planes was being assembled somewhere, but the logical side of him discounted that hope. The truth was that the Coast Guard had an impossible task stopping suspicious craft
entering
U.S. waters, where anything resembling a harbor was well charted. With all the pleasure craft and commercial traffic plying these waters, the notion of tracking a boat going in the other direction was ludicrous: it would be like asking the Metro Police to find an unidentified car with something hidden in its trunk during rush hour.

“We will be putting in now,” the tall man told them, watching Deal as if he understood what he might be thinking. “I think you will be more comfortable soon.”

“Who are you?” It was Linda Barnes behind him. “Where are you taking us?”

The tall man seemed to consider her questions. He allowed a tolerant smile. “You may call me Angel,” he said, using the Spanish pronunciation. “And as for where we are going, why not call it Paradise?”

The man who called himself Angel smiled and held something up in his hand. A watch, Deal saw.
His
watch. “I will keep this for you,” he said to Deal. “It is a good one, I think,” he added.

Deal stared back, saying nothing. It was a no-name watch his father had brought back from Switzerland twenty years ago. “Made right there in the Rolex factory,” he’d told Deal. “Same damned Swiss dwarfs, they just don’t put the three-thousand-dollar name on it.” His old man, all right, blow twenty grand on a trip to Europe, another thirty in the Salzburg casino, but he knew a bargain when he saw one.

Angel didn’t care about the monetary value of the watch, though. He didn’t want Deal calculating time and distance, or trying to somehow clock the sun’s movements, get some kind of fix on their location. Or maybe he just wanted to make a point.

“I can trust you, is that it?” Deal said.

Angel gave him a laugh. “Yes, my friend, that is one thing you can do.”

Deal heard the sound of retching beside him and knew that Linda Sheldon had finally lost her fight with the nausea. Angel’s gaze traveled to where she lay, watching with mild interest as her heaves continued. Maybe just checking to be sure she didn’t choke to death, Deal thought.

The boat had dropped to near-idle speed now, and Deal felt something brush along the hull. There was a momentary whine from one of the engines as a correction was made, and they were gliding free again. Linda Sheldon’s racking heaves had subsided, but her breathing sounded harsh and labored. The sweet-sour tang of vomit hung in the air.

Angel straightened, slipped Deal’s watch into his pocket. “We are arrived,” he said, with a glance at Linda. “You will be feeling better now.”

He grasped the sides of the open hatch then, and pulled himself up with the grace of a gymnast, an instant’s blur against the sky, bluer now with the onset of dusk, and then he was gone. Deal stared after him for a moment, catching sight of a sliver of moon, of a soaring shore bird. The stink of beached seaweed came to join the odors inside then, and he had a glimpse of an overhanging limb: a feathery Australian pine, he thought, the ubiquitous junk tree of the Florida Keys, of the Caribbean out-islands.

He turned back to Linda Barnes, who had twisted away from the pool of her own vomit and lay with her eyes closed, her face still pale. “You all right?” he asked.

She turned and opened her eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t puke on him,” she said. “The bastard. The polite sonofabitch.”

“Don’t waste your energy on him,” Deal said. “He’s not who we have to worry about.”

She turned and stared in disbelief at Deal. “Is that right?” she said. “Then who
do
we have to worry about?” The engines died altogether, and there was a soft thud as the boat drifted into a set of pilings. Deal could hear orders being shouted in Spanish, the thump of lines being tossed, the creaking of wood as the boat was made fast.

“Us,” Deal said. “We have to worry about us.” She was still staring at him when the rear hatch doors flew open and four men in camouflage fatigues were there to take them out.

***

Angel was not in sight
when Deal and Linda Sheldon were brought on deck, then prodded onto a spindly-looking dock where the Cigarette had been tied off. He glanced around at their surroundings, saw nothing remarkable. It could have been any of a hundred tiny islands he’d anchored off of in his life, and there were hundreds more just like it scattered about the Caribbean: on one side of the dock a ragged shoreline of mangroves that curved as far as he could see, a couple miles or more. On his left, a few feet of narrow beach littered with trash, sea scum, and ropes of seaweed deposited by the tides.

Further along, the land rose higher, a coral shelf that had once been sea bottom hove up into a mini-cliff that loomed half a dozen feet over the sheltered waters. The shelf was studded with the feathery Australian pines he’d glimpsed earlier, and he noted a low-lying house tucked amongst the trees. They’d entered the bay from that direction, he thought, which would have been the east.

The tall pines cut off any further view in that direction, and when he tried to turn to look directly behind him, he felt something strike him hard between the shoulder blades.
“¡Ándale!”
he heard as he staggered forward. Then, redundantly, “Let’s go.”

Another man caught him by the arm and a second came forward to point an automatic weapon in his face. Deal looked at the man with the weapon. Though they’d taken the ropes from their feet and throats, their hands were still bound behind their backs. He couldn’t imagine that he presented a very threatening pose.

“They have seen American movies,” a voice behind him said. Deal saw that Angel had joined their party. “A man who guards the President is to be greatly feared.”

Deal glanced at Linda Sheldon, who had her mouth open in surprise. When she saw the expression on his face, she stopped whatever she was about to say.

“Tell them I’m not Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Deal said.

Angel shrugged. “I think I will not tell them anything,” he said. “I would prefer they worried too much instead of too little.”

They walked in silence then, over the uneven planking of the dock and into the cool shade of the pines, where they assembled into single file, following a narrow path that rose up through the undergrowth. A series of sharp switchbacks that mounted the coral shelf, and then the path leveled out. Deal counted three men in front of him. He smelled cooking odors from somewhere, and realized that he’d had nothing to eat since morning. He felt the sting of something biting his neck. And then another. And another. The whining of the insects was burning at his ears and he willed his hands to stop jerking reflexively at the ropes that bound him.

“So tell me, Mr. Deal, if that is your true name,” Angel said from somewhere behind him. “Are you of the Secret Service or are you with the CIA?”

Deal wanted to tell him to check his driver’s license, then remembered what had happened to his wallet. He nearly laughed at the irony of it. He’d been carrying no ID except for the security badge pinned on him by Monroe Fielding. He’d blown away a couple of Angel’s men, had been caught while shepherding the First Lady down a secret passage, away from the carnage. What good was it going to do to protest?

“I’m a building contractor,” he said.

Angel laughed appreciatively. “And I,” he said, “am a Negro aviator, is that not how your joke goes?”

Deal tried to turn his head, but he felt another tap between his shoulder blades. “Not my joke,” he said.

“Well, Mr. Deal,” Angel said. “The precise name of your agency is not a matter of great concern to me just now. We will have time to discuss the matter further.”

Just wonderful, Deal thought. There were probably special interrogation techniques reserved for CIA types. Something else to look forward to.

“You want to tell us why you’re doing this?” he asked.

Angel laughed shortly. “What does it matter?”

“If it doesn’t matter, why not let us in on the plan?” Deal said.

“Enough talking,” was Angel’s reply, and when Deal tried to turn, a hand slammed roughly between his shoulders, jostling him forward.

They had finished climbing, it seemed. The undergrowth thinned and the path was taking them along an old quarry pit cut into the rock at what seemed to be the island’s ridgeline. Vine runners and trash trees choked the abandoned site now, and a great pile of cut stones, some of them the size of small cars, had been left near the edge of the pit. The path veered around the jumble of stones, back into the underbrush, where the insects resumed their attack.

They hadn’t gone far when Angel called ahead in rapid Spanish and one of the men who’d been leading the way stopped to swipe aside a thick spray of Brazilian holly that hung over the path, nearly obliterating it. The other two men made a turn into the passage and Deal felt another tap at the top of his spine.

The side path led a few feet through the thick holly and choker vines, then opened into a clearing where a raw cinderblock structure loomed. There was an angled corrugated tin roof rusted to a dull orange, littered with needles drifted down from the pines. The structure’s unfinished windows were covered with concrete reinforcement mesh. There was an entrance with a steel door propped open by a bowed two-by-four, the wood gone gray in the pounding sun.

Deal felt hands fumbling at his back then, felt something cold at his wrists. He was vaguely aware of a sawing motion, then sensed his arms swinging free. But before he could bring his numbed hands up before him, he was being propelled roughly toward the building. He managed to keep his feet under him until his shins cracked against the elevated jamb. He felt a bolt of pain, then his legs were numb, and he was down and rolling on the raw concrete floor of the place. He came up in time to see Linda Sheldon tumble inside after him, throwing her hands out to break her fall. A second later, the heavy door had slammed shut and they were alone again.

Deal heard muttering in Spanish outside, then a laugh, followed by the sounds of men receding through the brush that they’d fought their way through. He sat up, rubbing the rope burns at his wrists, then the twin bruises on his shins.

Linda Sheldon was sitting Indian-style, inspecting the palms of her hands in the dim light. She glanced at Deal. “I’m having a hard time making out my lifeline,” she said, rubbing her palms on the tails of her suitcoat. The coat was filthy now, but there was no mistaking the streaks of blood her palms left behind. “What’s your prognosis, Mr. Deal?”

Deal tried to sound convincing. “Like I said, we’d already be dead if that’s want they wanted.”

She gave him a nod. “I keep telling myself that.” She glanced around the single room, which was virtually bare. A listing stool, a scruffy mattress in one corner, a five-gallon plastic bucket in another. The label on the lidless bucket claimed there was drywall compound inside, but the odor that hung in the air told Deal otherwise. He could hear the angry buzz of flies all the way across the room.

“I liked the rooms at the Grand Bay better,” she said wearily.

Deal gave her a bitter laugh. It was a grim inventory, all right. Bucket, mattress, stool, that was about it. A lightbulb dangled from the rafters, but something told him it had never cast its first glimmer. He saw a candle stub on the floor near the mattress, but he doubted there were any matches around. Someone had scrawled something in wavering Spanish along the back wall of the room, but Deal couldn’t make it out at first.

“
Matanzas
,” he read finally. He turned to Linda. “How’s your Spanish?”

She shrugged. “I can usually get through ordering dinner,” she said. “I don’t remember that ever being on the menu.”

He nodded.

She glanced at the message. “What do you suppose he used to write it?”

Deal shook his head. What were the possibilities? Blood? Excrement? A charcoal stick?

“I don’t remember if I said thank you.”

He turned back, considered her words a moment. “For this?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I wish I’d have done better,” he said.

“You did more than most people would have.”

“We were lucky, that’s all.”

“It took more than luck for you to come after me.” She stared at him earnestly.

Deal shook his head. The wife of the President, kidnapped, dumped in a cesspool, she wanted to explain how valiant he’d been. He wanted to call the reporter who’d dubbed her the “Barrenness,” discuss a few things.

“There was a guy sitting in front of me, some cop from Queens, maybe. He stood up when the shooting started. He took a lot of fire, fell on top of me, or else I’d be dead, too, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“Still,” she insisted. “You could have just stayed where you were.” She gave Deal an odd look. She paused. “It looked like you knew what you were doing with that gun…” She trailed off again, left the question hanging.