Sympathy for the Devil (45 page)

He heard Leffingwell's voice say, "I'll be right there." A few seconds later, he heard sounds from the same source that alarmed him - spitting, gagging, choking sounds. He dashed toward the bathroom door and whatever awaited him on the other side.

Ever since he quit smoking two years ago, Bob Leffingwell had marveled at how sensitive his taste buds had become. That meant that good food tasted better than it used to - and, of course, bad food was worse than before.

Leffingwell knew what the liquid antacid labeled Gaviscon tasted like - it had a slight minty flavor. What he had just poured into his mouth did not taste like mint, or like Gaviscon, or like anything he wanted in there one instant longer.

Without even thinking about it, Leffingwell spit the liquid out violently. Most of it went into the sink, although some hit the mirror, and a little more ended up on the bathroom counter. Leffingwell had never tasted something so vile in his life, and he continued to gag even after his mouth was empty.

One of the aides, Patrick something, burst in, a panicked look on his face. "Sir, are you all right? Senator?"

Leffingwell, incapable of speech for the moment, held out a reassuring hand. He took the glass of water he'd set down nearby and used it to rinse his mouth out, thoroughly. By then Ron Messmer, one of the Secret Service agents, was at the door, shouldering young Patrick aside.

"What's happened, sir? Can you talk?"

Leffingwell could now, even though some of that awful taste remained in his mouth. "I came in here to take some antacid. It's the same brand I always use. Hell, I've used about half this bottle already. But I haven't had any in a couple of weeks, I guess, and the stuff's gone bad - in a
big
way." Leffingwell spat into the sink again. "I didn't think antacid was supposed to do that."

"I've never heard of that either, sir. Is this the bottle?"

"Yeah."

"Mind if I take a look?"

"Go ahead. Keep it, for all I care. I sure don't want any more of that crap."

Messmer held the bottle to his nose and sniffed. Then he got a little of the contents on one finger. He touched the finger to his tongue and immediately made a face.

"
Ugh
! I see what you mean, Senator. Antacid shouldn't taste like this, ever."

"Hell, Tom,
nothing
should taste like that!"

"I agree. Did you swallow any of this stuff, sir? Any at all?"

"No, I'm sure I didn't. As soon as that awful taste hit my tongue, I was spitting it out. None too carefully, as you can see. I made quite a mess."

"I think that may be just as well, sir. That you spit it out, I mean." Agent Messmer capped the bottle. "I'm going to have this sent to the FBI lab for analysis, Senator. You never know."

"You think someone tried to
poison
me?"

"I guess we won't know that until we find out whether it's poison, sir."

Mary Margaret Doyle walked into the living room of yet another hotel suite. I've got good news and bad news," she said.

Sargatanas looked up from the briefing paper he was studying. "Don't play stupid word games with me. If you've got something to say, say it."

"All right. I just saw in the online edition of the
Washington Times
that Nestor Greene, one-time political mercenary and dirty-tricks expert, was killed when a thermite bomb went off in his car, while he was parked outside the post office in Annandale, which is where he lives -
lived
."

"So our little surprise worked. Good. Pity I couldn't have seen his face, in those last few seconds before the pain took him. And what were you characterizing as 'bad news'?"

"Simply the fact that, unlike Greene, Bob Leffingwell is still very much among the living. If he hasn't taken the drug by now, I think the odds are he never will."

Sargatanas put the briefing paper down and sat back in his chair. "Do you think Greene betrayed us - kept the money and never hired anyone to poison Leffingwell?"

"No way of knowing - especially now."

"Did he give you the name of the supposed 'professional' he hired?"

"No - he just said it was someone who was highly recommended."

"Recommended by his grandmother, most likely. Well, this leaves us in an awkward position. Leffingwell's got a few more delegates pledged to him than we do, and the convention is the week after next. That means there will be what your politicians so charmingly call a 'floor fight.' Can we win?"

"Garrett says we can."

"Garrett is paid to be optimistic. Martinez hasn't returned your phone call yet, has he?"

"No, I've heard nothing from him, at either of the numbers I gave his people."

"That spic cocksucker. I bet he's returning Leffingwell's phone calls. If Martinez were to, say, fall off a bridge tomorrow, what happens to his delegates?"

"They'd be free to go wherever they wished. But - you're not thinking of doing something to Martinez, are you?"

"Cold feet, Mary Margaret? It really is a little late for that."

"No, I just meant it would be hard to get to him on such short notice and still preserve our own deniability. Especially now that we don't have Greene as an intermediary."

He looked at her in a way that she had learned to dread. "You're not by any chance questioning my decision to get rid of Greene, are you?"

"No - no, of course not."

"Because if you were, that would be insolent. And what happens to insolent little girls, hmm?"

"T-they are punished. Severely."

He held her in his basilisk gaze a little longer, then said, "Get out of my sight. I have some thinking to so."

She got.

Chapter 42

"I don't mean to be all gloom and doom," Quincey Morris told those assembled in the suite at the Best Western. "We do have certain things going for us - and they may just be enough to bring us through, successfully and in one piece."

"God willing," Finlay muttered solemnly.

"A consummation devoutly to be wished," Peters said, with a crooked grin.

"Fuckin' A," Libby Chastain added, with a grin of her own.

"Let me run it down for you, and then I'll tell you the idea Libby and I have cooked up to make the most effective use of it."

"We have three essential advantages," Morris said. "I'll start with the smallest and work up to the biggest one. The smallest one is surprise - neither Sargatanas, nor any of the people guarding him, have any idea that we're in the game, or what we're planning to do. And the aggressor always has the advantage."

"It's less of an advantage here than it would be in other situations," Arkasian said. "That's because you're planning to surprise the U.S. Secret Service. I'm not saying that because it's my team, rah-rah. But Secret Service agents are
trained
to react to surprises. Every six weeks, an agent rotates back to the academy for two weeks of testing, weapons requalification, and simulated attacks on a protectee. If you do security work for a long time, and nothing happens, you get soft and slow and complacent. The training is designed to counteract that. In fact, I'm due to rotate through the academy the week of the Republican convention, so I won't even be there when all this goes down." He gave them a sour expression. "Well, at least it gives me an alibi, if I need one."

"Jerry had described for me the intense training the agents receive so they'll react fast in emergencies," Morris said. "That's why I listed surprise on the low end of our advantages. Still, we get to choose when to strike, and how. Even though the agents may well respond very, very quickly, we still get to make the first move. And even Secret Service agents don't train to deal with the kind of stuff they'll be facing in Madison Square Garden this time. And speaking of the Garden, I'll let Jerry discuss our second advantage."

"The next element in our favor is, well, me," Arkasian said. "In other circumstances, I guess you could say that I'd be acting as a mole who is betraying one of our leaders to our nation's enemies. It just so happens that in this case, I know that the country's biggest enemy is the guy who wants to
be
our leader."

"Still, that must be a lot of cognitive dissonance for you to deal with," Finlay said.

"Not as much as you might think, Marty. Okay, so one of the big plusses of having me in this group is that I can tell you with almost 100 per cent certainty how Secret Service agents will react in a given situation. We all get the same training, apart from specialists like snipers. All I have to do is ask myself what
I'd
do, and I can apply it to the other agents as well."

Arkasian stepped over to the nearest wall, where a rolled bundle of poster-size documents was leaning.

"Mal," Morris said, "you wanna help me move this table into the center, please?"

Peters and Morris picked up the low coffee table and brought it into the middle of the oval created by the chairs. Arkasian pulled rubber bands off the bundle and unrolled it onto the table. He and the others found small, heavy objects in the room to place on the corners, to keep the thing from rolling up again.

"It wasn't easy to copy these with nobody else being the wiser," Arkasian said. "I had to do it over several evenings when I could come up with a plausible reason to be alone in the document room. As you folks might imagine, this stuff is classified - just Confidential, though. If it was Top Secret I'd never get near it without two other agents with automatic weapons standing over me every second."

Arkasian pointed to the top document. "This sheet is part of the blueprint for the Garden - it's up-to-date, revised after all the new construction they did there a few years ago. The Garden is so fucking huge, the damn blueprint is spread out over five of these pages. We can come back to those later."

He counted off five sheets, pulled them free from the pile, and put them aside. The next page wasn't a blueprint, but it seemed to be almost as detailed.

"This is the Service's plan for bringing Senator Stark into the garden. It looks like there's going to be a floor fight for delegates this time out, which means each of the three biggies - Stark, Leffingwell, and Martinez - will be addressing the convention at different times. That doesn't usually happen, they tell me. Most years, the primary system determines the nominee months beforehand, and all they do at the convention is listen to speeches, fight over the party platform, and wait to see who the Presidential candidate's running mate is gonna be. But not this year."

Arkasian pointed to the elaborate diagram. "This is the Stark movement plan. There's a different one for each of the three, based on the old military principle that you never follow the same route through enemy country twice. If the Service used the same procedure for each candidate, somebody who observed the first one would automatically know the others. So this is the specific strategy for getting Stark from the Secret Service vehicle - an armored Suburban, like they all are - into the Garden and onto the podium securely, and back out again when he's done orating. Check it out."

He pointed at one edge of the drawing. "Stark will be brought in via the 23rd St. Entrance. From the street door, it is 420 feet to the first side corridor. Turn right, and then it's 190 feet to the elevator."

Arkasian looked up and around at the others. "The public isn't allowed to use the elevators in the Garden, apart from folks in wheelchairs, things like that - and they sure as hell won't be using this one Tuesday night, when Stark is scheduled to speak."

He rested his finger on the spot labeled
Elevator
4
(Stark)
. "The elevator will have agents stationed at the street level entrance where Stark gets on, at the elevator door on Level C where Stark will exit, and there will be armed agents on the elevator itself, before he even gets in it."

The finger moved again. "From the elevator, Stark and his Secret Service escort of twelve agents will turn right, and walk the length of this corridor, which is 628 feet. After that, he goes into a room designated as a holding area, and from there to the podium where he'll speak. I'm glossing over that part, because this corridor is the crucial area." Arkasian looked up at them again, his expression grim. "That's where we're going to hit him."

"And that brings me to our third, and biggest advantage," Morris said. "If we didn't have this one going for us, the other two wouldn't be enough - not nearly enough. But we
do
have it, and it can be expressed in one word:
magic
."

Mary Margaret Doyle walked into the suite's living room to find Sargatanas in an apparent good mood, for once. She distrusted this, of course - sometimes he was in a good humor only because he had devised some new sexual degradation to inflict upon her. Many of these had been exciting, at first. But now his torments were just something to be endured.

"There you are," he said. "I want to talk to you about our friend Ramon Martinez."

A jolt of fear made her heart race. He had been obsessing about the Senator from New Mexico for days now. If he had decided to do something drastic about Martinez, it could bring the whole carefully-built structure down around their ears.

"Have you decided on a safe way to... deal with him?"

He gave a bark of laughter. "Deal with him? I'm tempted to send you over there to fuck him. I understand Ramon has a taste for bimbos."

As usual, she ignored the insult. "What do you mean?"

"I heard from the Senator himself, not ten minutes ago. It seems he's been giving thought to his future, has Ramon. And, in return for my pledge to make him my running mate, he's going to throw his support to me in New York."

"Why that's... that's fantastic!"

"This will be during the second ballot, of course. Ramon wants the joy of hearing his name placed in nomination to be President of this Great Land of Ours, which is to be expected."

"Yes, it's common practice - or used to be, back in the days when floor fights were the rule, rather than the exception."