Presidential Deal (5 page)

Sometimes, he thought, he must have been the only kid who’d ever truly paid attention to the story of the three little pigs, and sometimes he worried that his care and his attention to detail had spilled over into so much of his life that it made him seem stodgy, if not downright pig-headed, but there’d been some pretty fearsome wolves coming after him and his family the past half-dozen years or so, hadn’t there, and not one had been able to blow his house down yet. He gave himself a little inward nod of self-congratulation that might have actually held, but for the sudden troubling thought that intruded: Hadn’t a couple of the little piggies who used to live with him moved out?

The question was enough to shake him from his reverie.
Think too much, you could always find a way toward trouble, Deal
. Time to get in motion. He punched the power button on the television, passed out the doorway of his bedroom, moved down the hall and into the kitchen, where Driscoll was rummaging in the refrigerator for a beer.

“Make yourself at home,” he called toward Driscoll’s formidable backside, checking his watch once more: plenty of time, no more than twenty minutes, this time of day, from the fourplex, on the edge of Little Havana, to the Hyatt in the middle of downtown.

Driscoll came up out of the refrigerator’s maw with a Red Stripe in his hand, saluted him with it. “Not bad,” he said to Deal. “I been buying Old Milwaukee recently,” he added.

“You’ve always bought Old Milwaukee,” Deal said.

“Yeah, but it used to be because it was cheap. Now, since I read that
Consumer’s Digest
report that says it’s number one, I realize it’s because I got good taste.”

Deal regarded him for a minute: the sweatshirt, baggy plaid Bermudas, the foam oozing from the already-popped Red Stripe. Two hundred and forty pounds on a maybe six-foot frame. Taste?

Deal considered two or three responses, but then he looked into Driscoll’s guileless, I’ll-step-in-the-way-of-a-truck-for-you gaze. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m out of here, Vernon. I’ll give the President your best.”

“Do that,” Driscoll said. “And don’t forget to explain what we can do for him, either.”

“I’ve got the cards,” Deal said, heading toward the curb, his neck chafing anew in the heat.

“I’ll be right here, manning the phones,” Driscoll said.

Chapter 5

“Who told you to bring a unit back here?” the man in the suit was saying.

Salazar towered over the man, who had to look up into the sun to find his features. The sun was so bright that the eyes of the man in the suit had begun to water even though he was wearing dark glasses.

Salazar thought he looked convincing, even natural, in the uniform of the American police, though he no longer favored uniforms. The pin on his breast pocket was stamped with the name “ESCOBEDO, D.” He had no idea what the “D” had stood for when Escobedo was still among the living, but he knew what it stood for now. He also knew that the man speaking to him came from somewhere in the northerly regions of the United States and that he was not used to the heat or the humidity or the punishing angle of the subtropical summer sun.

The two of them were standing by a service dock at the rear of the great hotel. There was a City of Miami cruiser not far away, where Salazar had parked it so as to block the narrow service path, and a bank of garbage Dumpsters off to the side, where a slope fell away in a tangle of unidentifiable tropical foliage toward the broad and listless estuary known as the Miami River. The sun had turned the Dumpsters into cauldrons, reeking with castoff shellfish and the remains of carved red meats and whatever else had not made its way into the stomachs of the pampered guests up above.

“Humping-A,” the man in the suit said as he took off his dark glasses and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “I’ll be glad to get back to Washington.”

Salazar knew that the man’s remark was not directed at him. The man was disgusted with his superiors, with the need to be in this place at such a time of year, with an assignment that required him to be standing outside less than a dozen feet from a veritable shipload of rotting garbage, giving orders to a simple-minded local officer of the law who likely did not speak English and who would never know the pleasures of a good steak dinner in an air-conditioned restaurant in Georgetown where the ferns hung in well-tended clumps and the women had fair skin and were willing to look a man squarely in the eye when they were interested.

As the man wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief, Salazar noted the thin curl of wire that led up out of the man’s ear to loop and dive down again under the collar of his jacket. When the man put his handkerchief away and turned to continue his questioning, Salazar held up his palm and spoke in a quiet but concerned tone of voice.

“You are with the detail of the President?”

The man stopped what he was about to say and gave Salazar a closer look.

“Of course I am. What…?”

“I think it is something you should see,” Salazar said, cutting the man off once again. He turned and moved quickly toward the rear of the cruiser, motioning for the man to follow.

Salazar inserted a key into the trunk of the cruiser and unsnapped the lock. He glanced back at the man in the suit and indicated that he should look at whatever was inside.

“What the hell…” the man in the suit said when he caught sight of the officer who lay staring up out of the trunk into the brilliant sky without so much as a blink or a waver.

The man in the suit sent his hand under his coat. Possibly he had been reaching for his phone, intending to call in news of this startling development. Or it could have been that the situation had unfolded itself before him in an instant and he was actually reaching for his sidearm. Wherever it had been traveling, his hand stopped suddenly, at the very instant that he sounded a sharp intake of breath. The knife so slender, so sharp, it would take a moment for the pain to register. But the pain would come, bright and sharp and awful, and the man might even have lived long enough to cry out, except that Salazar’s free hand now clamped his mouth shut, and the last thing he could have seen was a red film bathing the palm-lined world as he tumbled, and the lid of the trunk coming down like night.

“Base to Steam Cleaner, Base to Steam Cleaner. Everything okay back there?”

A single touch to turn it on, and after that the device operated on simple voice activation, the better to keep one’s hands free in case of emergencies, Salazar noted, fitting the earpiece more snugly into place.

Salazar gave the appropriate response in rapid but carefully accented English. He had once been trained, after all, by that very agency. There was a pause, and Salazar wondered for a moment if perhaps something had gone wrong.

“Check that, Steam Cleaner,” the voice answered then, and then skipped off to monitor the next agent.

Salazar turned to face the opposite bank of the turgid river, making the prearranged gesture. It was a distance of a hundred yards or more, but still he heard the sound of the boat’s engines firing, saw the craft swing away from its docking place. Two more police cruisers had swung into position at the head of the narrow lane that led down from a side street to the secluded loading dock. One of the officers who stepped from the cruisers gave a wave to Salazar, who returned it easily.

Salazar checked his watch. Out in front of the grand hotel, where the crowds had gathered to both cheer and decry the arrival of the American president, another group would be moving into place, its work yet to come. He nodded, wiping the slender shaft of his weapon carefully on the handkerchief he had availed himself of. He tossed the soiled handkerchief into the mouth of one of the Dumpsters and walked through the fetid air toward the ramp of the loading dock.

Chapter 6

“Would you please come with me, sir?”

Deal stared back at the man who had spoken to him. Guy with a strange-looking ID badge clipped to his suit. He was in his early thirties, wore his hair carefully trimmed, regimental tie, white shirt, dark wool suit not unlike Deal’s own, if a notch lighter in weight and stretched a bit more across the shoulders and chest. Deal suspected he hadn’t built his pecs by swinging a hammer or carrying hod, though. He also suspected the question wasn’t really a question.

“Sure,” Deal said. He checked his watch, then followed the guy across the gleaming marbled lobby of the hotel.

The guy seemed like a jerk, but Deal was happy to be inside in the cool air-conditioning after the frantic twenty-minute hike he’d made from the Metrorail parking lot. The Metrorail lot was as close as he’d been able to get to the Hyatt, a hotel that had been built by DealCo, in fact, but that had been twenty years ago, back when his old man had been running the company show, riding high, and headed for an equally long fall.

Deal had tried to explain why he was headed to the hotel to a traffic cop, leaving out the part that he’d helped to build it, but the cop had stared back as if he were crazy, had given Deal a choice, move the Hog or submit to arrest, though not exactly in those terms. Deal supposed it hadn’t been unreasonable, some guy wearing a wool suit out in the Miami summer, driving what had once been a Cadillac sedan now sawed and chopped and converted into some kind of pickup truck from a loony-bin dream, stops in the middle of the street and says he’s a hero, take me to your president. Sure, Deal thought. He was lucky the cop hadn’t just drawn down and fired on the spot.

The security type, meantime, had stopped, was holding a finger up to indicate Deal should stop, too. His other hand had slipped inside his coat. They were in a quiet little room off the side of the lobby now, the carpet heavy, the furniture gilt-trimmed and massive, the drapes long and thick, enough velvet there to be used in most of the movie theaters of his youth. It was the sort of place that made you sleepy just being in it. If the guy had his hand on a gun, Deal thought, he could fire with impunity, the sound wouldn’t travel a foot.

“I have someone named Deal here,” the security type was saying, apparently to himself. His eyes flicked up at Deal. “
John
Deal?”

Deal nodded, noting the wire coming out of the guy’s ear. They waited for a moment, staring at each other, though the security man’s gaze seemed to focus somewhere else.

“Is this going to take a long time?” Deal asked.

The guy looked at him, but didn’t say anything.

“I’m part of the program,” Deal said. “The Medal of Valor program.”

The guy nodded, ran his eyes over him, then glanced away.

“Uh-huh,” the guy said finally. “Right.” His eyes seemed to refocus, as if he’d snapped out of standby mode.

The guy had his hand under his coat again, came out with some kind of security wand. He used it to scan Deal from head to toe, pausing twice: once for Deal to fish out his keys, a second time to examine his Swiss Army knife.

“Picture ID, Mr. Deal?”

Deal reached into his hip pocket for his wallet, noticing how the guy watched his every movement now. “Sorry I forgot the letter,” he said.

The guy nodded slightly, the sort of acknowledgment you give an alien who’s about to assume his true, frightful form.

“I read about a guy swallowed a pound of plastique, ground his fillings together, the sparks set him off like a rocket,” Deal said as he watched a local television crew bustle past. “Took out an entire dental group.”

The security guy looked him over. “I could make another call, you know.”

“I didn’t ask to come here,” Deal said. A couple more exchanges, he figured, any chance of making it to the ballroom would be gone. He envisioned the headlines: “
LOCAL HERO GOES BERSERK, ASSAULTS PRESIDENTIAL SECURITY DETAIL—AWARD RECALLED
.” His mind wandered on, pictured Isabel reading the story, asking her mother to explain “berserk.”

Deal had seen the look in the man’s eyes. For a moment, he felt the absurdity of the situation. It was true, the implication in the eyes of the security guy. Deal had no business here, mingling with cops who put their lives on the line every day, mothers who had chased gang-bangers and drug runners from their embattled neighborhoods.

All this was Driscoll’s fault. Deal could have been with his daughter in Orlando, going hand-to-hand with some ride operator at Disney World instead of this.

“Picture ID,” the guy repeated. It wasn’t a request this time.

Deal withdrew his wallet, flipped it open to display his license. The guy took the wallet, studied the license as if there were some code in there to be broken. After what seemed like a long time, he glanced up at Deal, his expression doubtful.

“This expired three months ago,” the guy said.

Deal nodded. They’d offered to send a car for him. Why hadn’t he accepted? “Is it important?” he said. He checked his watch again.

“Just hold on.” The guy turned away, saying something into his invisible mike. There was a rumbling noise from out in the lobby, a couple of workers pushing a dolly full of banquet chairs, and the security man opened a door to an interior office. When Deal started after him, the security man held up his hand to indicate he should stay where he was. He waved the wallet at Deal as if to say he just might return, then closed the door, still talking into his invisible mike.

There was a terrific crash in the lobby outside, and Deal turned to see that the chairs had toppled off the dolly onto the marble. The two workers were shouting at one another in Spanish and a manager was converging rapidly on the scene. Deal glanced at the doorway where the security man had disappeared with his wallet. No sign of him.

“Mr. Deal?”

Deal turned back toward the lobby. The man he’d taken for a hotel manager was hurrying toward him, maneuvering around the toppled chairs and the gesticulating workmen without so much as a glance.

“We’d nearly given up on you.” He was florid-faced, silver-haired, his hand extended, an impressive bank of teeth on display.

“Monroe Fielding, Special Assistant to the President,” the man said. He reached out, clipped one of the security badges on Deal’s suit coat. He took Deal’s arm. “We’d better hurry along.”

Deal hung back. “My wallet’s in there.” He pointed at the door to the inner office.

“Excuse me?”

“One of your security men took my ID.”

Fielding rolled his eyes. He hurried over to the door, tried it, found it locked. He banged on it with his hand, but there was no response.

“Anyone in there?” Fielding called, but no one answered. Fielding checked his watch, then glanced at Deal. For a moment Deal wondered if Fielding believed him. What if Fielding demanded ID?

“I assure you we’ll have your wallet returned, Mr. Deal,” Fielding said, smoothing his hair into place. It was impressive hair, Deal thought. The kind someone like Fielding would want to keep smooth. “Let’s get you up with the others, then I’ll take care of it.”

Deal glanced at the silent doorway. Along with the expired license, he had maybe fifty dollars in the wallet, a wad of receipts and notes, Driscoll’s business card. Maybe they’d lose the wallet, he could say he’d been carrying a fortune.

“What say we go on upstairs, Mr. Deal?”

Deal turned to him.
What say?
Deal thought.
What say?

“Sure,” he told Fielding finally, and followed the man away.