The Jury Master (13 page)

Tina grabbed his hand, stopping him. “You’re supposed to be on vacation. Take at least a day off, David.”

20

H
E RAN HIS
hand over the cover as if he were feeling fine silk. The edges had worn, the cover yellowed with time, and the word “Classified,” stamped in red at odd angles, had faded to pink, but there was no mistaking it. Charles Jenkins started to open the cover, then closed it like the door to a closet filled with bad memories. His chest tightened to the point that he ran a hand over it and pulled back his shoulders. He felt suddenly out of breath.

“Are you all right?” Alex Hart asked.

No, he wasn’t all right. He felt as if he were having a heart attack, and if he ever was going to have one, this was the moment. He looked down at the table. The file still existed. Absurd. All these years he’d thought it had been destroyed. It hadn’t. Joe had taken it. The thought snapped him back to reality, and the reality was, if Joe had gone to the trouble of hiding the file for thirty years, he would not have entrusted it to just anyone. That put the stranger standing in his living room in a completely different light.

“How did you know him?” he asked.

“Joe? He was a friend of my father.”

“Who’s your . . .” The place in his memory that her face had tweaked in the garden flew open like an unlatched door in a strong wind; the resemblance was remarkable.

“Robert Hart,” he whispered.

She looked surprised. “You knew my father, also?”

During their two years in Mexico City together, Jenkins and Joe Branick had visited Professor Robert Hart’s home several times. Hart was an American married to a Mexican national. He taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and had homes near the Mexican Golf Club and in a suburb outside Washington, D.C.—a lavish lifestyle for a university professor. But it was not Robert Hart’s face that Jenkins now saw so clearly. It was the face of the beautiful
criolla
woman who had greeted him and Joe at the door to her home. Her straight dark hair reached to the middle of her back, green eyes revealing her Spanish descent. Alex Hart was the spitting image of her mother, except for her height and the curl in her hair. Both came from her father. The past, one Jenkins had worked so hard to bury, had now been thrust in his face in the form of a woman he last saw riding a bike in the front yard of her family home.

“I need a drink,” he said.

He walked into the kitchen and rummaged in the cabinets, finding it at the back of a shelf. Back in the main room he set the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two mason jars on the table, poured two fingers in each, handed one to her, and downed his shot, feeling the raw burn that caused his eyes to water. When the sting passed he poured a second shot.

“How old are you, Alex?” His voice was rough from the alcohol, like Clint Eastwood’s in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

She laughed. “I’m well past twenty-one, but thanks for the compliment.” She had her mother’s easy way about her.

“You look like your mother.”

She lowered the jar. “Thank you. She died a little over two years ago.”

“I’m sorry. Your father—is he still alive?”

“No. He died six months later. The doctors said it was a heart attack. I think it was a broken heart. He loved her so.”

“Yes, he did. He was a good man.” Jenkins sat down and offered her the second chair. This time she sat. “I take it you know he worked for us?”

Robert Hart had for many years been a well-paid CIA consultant on South American affairs. His specialty was right-wing Mexican revolutionary groups.

“Not until I was older. My mother explained it to me.” She downed her shot, grimaced, and put the mason jar on a stack of envelopes.

They considered the file between them like something that might bite. “Do you know how Joe got it?”

She shook her head.

“You were working with him, though.” He rubbed his hands together, a habit when he thought. Then he said, “Oil. Nonreligious oil.”

It was not a great leap of intellect. To the contrary, Robert Peak’s election platform had played on American frustration and anger at rising gas prices dictated by OPEC, and on the surging resentment at the loss of American lives fighting oil wars. Americans were tired of Muslim terrorists holding them hostage. Much like Richard Nixon’s promise during his presidential campaign to end the war in Vietnam—without revealing how—Peak had promised to end America’s dependence on Middle East oil. Political pundits called it a campaign ruse. Peak had always been well financed by the oil companies, and as long as they remained the largest shareholders in American car manufacturing companies, the likelihood of Peak doing anything that impacted their bottom line was slim to none. Others speculated that Peak intended to lobby Congress to pass a bill that would require increased research of alternative fuel sources and increase the percentage of automobiles required to run on those fuels. That, however, would affect the oil companies, and so long as the automobile manufacturers remained the major shareholders in those corporations, that scenario was also unlikely. With the economy continuing to spiral into the toilet, Peak was in no position to alienate his biggest political support structure. There were several Latin American possibilities: Venezuela, though the government was teetering on the brink of chaos, and Mexico, with its over 75-billion-barrel oil reserve, but only if he could get at the oil, literally, and with current technology. Neither was likely.

“How does he do it?”

She studied him for a moment. “A reopening of the Mexican oil market to American oil companies and related manufacturing industries.”

Jenkins shook his head. The nationalization of Mexico’s oil market was as sacrosanct to Mexicans as the Virgin of Guadalupe. In 1938, after an audit revealed that United States and other foreign oil companies were robbing Mexico blind, Mexico’s President, Lázaro Cárdenas, expelled them and nationalized Mexico’s oil. Cárdenas had then forced Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller to back down from the confrontation, threatening to sell Mexico’s oil to Germany during World War II if the United States did not. Mexican history books proclaimed Cárdenas a hero, and Mexico continued to celebrate March 18 as a “day of national dignity.”

“They’ll never do it.”

“Members of the administration have been meeting with representatives of Castañeda,” she said, referring to Alberto Castañeda, Mexico’s recently elected young president, who was being likened to John F. Kennedy.

Jenkins remained skeptical. “Why? What’s in it for Mexico?”

“An increased percentage of the American oil market at a fixed per-barrel cost tied to the world market. That’s tens of billions of dollars.”

Jenkins thought about the information for a moment. “How high up are the talks?”

“The president wasn’t going to South America to talk about global warming.”

“And they wouldn’t risk the confidentiality of the talks by bringing in Peak unless they were close to cutting a deal.” He stood and paced, the wood planks groaning as he transferred his weight. Castañeda was known to be a right-wing conservative, publicly opposed to any foreign intervention into Mexican affairs, including subsurface mineral rights. “It’s counterintuitive for him to be engaging in these discussions.”

“You’re thinking like an American. In Mexico the president is elected for a single six-year term. He doesn’t have to worry about being reelected.”

“It will ruin any chance his party has of staying in power. It makes no sense.”

“Or it makes perfect sense.”

He stopped pacing. “Tell me how?”

“Peak has him over a barrel—no pun intended. Mexico’s oil fields were put up as collateral for the last financial aid package after the collapse of Mexico’s private banks.”

“Okay.”

“If Mexico fails to repay that debt, they could lose control of the oil anyway. Castañeda’s not exactly negotiating from a position of strength. He can blame the prior administration for getting Mexico into NAFTA; it was a bad deal. This allows him to cut Mexico’s losses and negotiate a better deal. On its face it will help Mexican laborers to work in the United States, create better-paying jobs for the poor, expand Mexico’s economic market, and bring money for social improvements.”

“His primary support groups. He can paint himself as a hero,” Jenkins said, picking up on her train of thought.

“He said he would be a president of the people, for the people. It’s too good an offer to let pass.”

Jenkins looked out the plate-glass windows to where the Arabians grazed in peace. “That’s the problem. There is no such thing as ‘too good an offer’ if Robert Peak is involved.”

21

Financial District,

San Francisco

T
HEY STOOD SHIVERING,
the collars of their coats turned up against a cold wind funneling through the canyon of high-rise buildings. It moaned softly as it passed, and brought the smell of the bay from a week of ninety-degree temperatures that spoiled the plant life and left a metallic taste in the air. The heat wave had ended.

Sloane found the financial district at night eerily quiet; it was like standing in the courtyard of an enormous, suddenly deserted apartment complex. The sheer immensity of the buildings played tricks on the mind, making one expect to hear all kinds of noise: people talking, car engines, sirens. Instead it was only the hum of the wind, an occasional car engine, and the scraping of an errant paper blowing up the sidewalk and gutters. San Franciscans fled the downtown business area at sunset, migrating to their homes, to the restaurants in North Beach and Chinatown, and to the trendy nightclubs South of Market. It left the financial district feeling like a ghost town from a Hollywood set.

“You don’t have to wait with me, David. I know you’re worried about being late.”

He pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll let her know I’m running a bit behind.”

Melda’s phone rang three times before her answering machine picked up. Sloane left a message, flipped his phone closed, and looked at his watch again.

“Everything okay?” Tina asked.

“I’m just surprised she’s not home yet.”

“Go ahead. I’ll be fine.”

“No. It’s all right.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and hunched his shoulders to protect his neck from the cold. “She probably stayed to have a cup of coffee with a certain gentleman she’s been talking about.”

“Another man? She stood you up!”

Tina grinned, turning her head slightly to allow the breeze down Battery Street to blow the hair from her face. He had always thought her eyes blue, but now, in the ambient light from the building lobby, they were more the color of a high summer sky, with flecks of gray and yellow. She leaned toward him, as if being pulled by an invisible string, and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she stepped past him to the newspaper bin behind him, studying the paper through the plastic casing.

“Do you have that message slip? The one I gave you earlier about the twenty-three-year-old stockbroker with the hot stock tip of the week?”

He reached into his pocket but had changed shirts.

“What was the name?” she asked. “The name on the slip?”

“I think it was Joe Branick—why?”

She spoke as if talking to herself. “Not the latest go-getter with the hot stock tip of the week,” she said.

“What?” He walked to where she stood. The photograph was just above the fold, with the name typed beneath it. Sloane looked at her, disbelieving, then rummaged in his pocket for a quarter. He deposited the coin in the slot and took a copy of the paper, reading the headline out loud.

“President grieves friend’s death.”

She leaned over his shoulder, and they read the copy down the right side of the page.

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON-At an early morning White House press conference at which President Robert Peak was expected to discuss his participation in a South American environmental conference focusing on global warming, White House Chief of Staff Parker Madsen confirmed that Joe Branick, Special Assistant to the President, was dead.

West Virginia Park Police discovered Branick’s body just after 5:30 a.m. near a deserted fire trail in Black Bear National Park. The single gunshot wound to the head was apparently self-inflicted. Madsen said no further details would be forthcoming from the White House and directed all questions to the Department of Justice. He described the President and the West Wing as “stunned.”

Boyhood friends and college roommates at Georgetown, Peak and Branick had remained close personal friends. The President, who was to leave this morning for South America to attend the summit, has canceled that trip. In a written statement released by the White House, the President was said to have delivered the news personally to Branick’s wife and three adult children.

Sloane lowered the paper and reconsidered his recollection of the name. “It has to be a coincidence,” he said softly.

Her cab pulled to the curb.

“He’s dead; the paper says he killed himself. Why would he call you?”

He looked at her. “We don’t even know it was him.”

“Of course it’s him. Who else would it be? Do you know him?”

“I . . .” He considered the photograph in the newspaper. Something about the eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m sure I don’t.”

The cabdriver, a reed-thin black man, leaned over, impatient. Sloane opened the cab door and handed him thirty dollars through the window slot. “Take her home. Keep the change.”

Tina protested. “David, you’re not paying for my cab.” Despite her humor, he knew her to be fiercely independent.

“You bet your ass I’m not,” he said. “I’ll bill it to Paul Abbott.”

“In that case I’ll take the long way home.” She smiled and slid into the backseat. “If nothing else it would make for an interesting story,” she said, nodding to the paper in his hand.

He wondered.

“You okay?”

“I’m still in shock that you’re leaving.”

“Maybe not.” She reached for the door handle. “I told you I’d stay for the right guy. You just have to find him for me.”