Trust Your Eyes (16 page)

He nodded slowly.

“First thing we have to do is get an ice pack on your head. You okay with that?”

He considered my offer. “Okay,” he said.

I extended a hand, and was relieved when he took it. I noticed his hands were bruised, too. “Jesus, you really made a mess of yourself.”

He looked at me. “How is your neck?”

It hurt. “Fine,” I said.

“I’m sorry I tried to kill you,” he said.

“You weren’t trying to kill me. You were just angry. I was an asshole.”

He nodded. “Yeah. A fuckhead.”

He sat at the kitchen table while I found a soft ice pack in the freezer. Dad was always suffering from some kind of strain or pulled muscle and there were enough packs in there to cool a Dairy Queen. “Hold this on your head,” I said, handing Thomas one.

I pulled over a chair so I could put an arm around his shoulder.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

“No,” Thomas said.

“I kind of lost it.”

“Have you been taking your medication?” he asked,

I hadn’t had a single M&M since returning from Dr. Grigorin’s. “No, I guess I forgot to take them.”

“You run into problems when you don’t take your medication,” he said.

I kept my arm around him. “There’s no excuse for what I did. I know…I know you’re the way you are, and screaming at you, that’s not going to make things any different.”

“What are the rules?” he asked.

“I just…I just want you to check with me first before you send any e-mails, or make any phone calls. But you can still wander all the cities you want for as long as you want. Is that a deal?”

He thought about it, still holding the freezer bag to his head. “I don’t know.”

“Thomas, not everyone in the government understands that you’re trying to help them. They don’t understand that you’re a good guy. I want to make sure there aren’t any misunderstandings. It’s not just you who could get in trouble. It’s me, too.”

“I guess,” he said. He took the bag from his head. “It’s really cold.”

“Try to keep it there. It’ll keep the swelling down.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I’ve never seen you get that angry,” I said. “I mean, I had it coming, but I didn’t know you had it in you.”

As Thomas held the cold bag to his head, his eyes were shielded.

“I’m going to go back to work now,” he said, slipping out from under my arm and heading for the stairs, leaving the bag on the table.

His back to me, he said, “Am I still making dinner tonight?”

I had forgotten. “No,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

EIGHTEEN

BRIDGET
is coming out of the building on Thirty-fifth Street where the PR firm she works for is headquartered when she sees him waiting there for her.

He grabs her firmly by the elbow and starts leading her down the sidewalk.

“Howard!” she says, glancing down at his hand. “Let go of my arm. You’re hurting me.”

Howard Talliman says nothing. He swiftly moves her along, Bridget struggling to maintain her balance on her heels. He steers her into the lobby of a building, the first place he’s spotted where he can talk to her without anyone else listening in.

“What does she know?” Howard asks once they are inside. He has moved Bridget up against a marble wall and still not released his grip on her.

“Howard, what the hell—”

“She says she heard things.” He is hissing, almost snakelike.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I met with her. When she was leaving, she said she heard things.”

“Heard what? What did she say she heard?”

“She didn’t say. But she intimated that it was something damaging. Things you’d said, things that made sense once she knew who you are.”

“Howard, I swear—”

“Did you talk to Morris while you were in Barbados?”

“Of course. We talk all the time.”

“You talked to him when you were with Allison Fitch?”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure I did. Howard, I can’t feel my hand. You’re cutting off the circulation.”

He releases his grip but is still only inches from her, his face pressed up to hers. “Was she present when you had those conversations?”

“No, I mean, she might have been in the other room. I talked to him when I was in the bathroom, or maybe when Allison was. I talked to him by the pool one day, when she went off to get us drinks.”

“So she might have heard any of them. She could have been behind you, or on the other side of a door,” Howard says.

“Okay, I suppose it’s possible, but even if she did, we didn’t—I’m sure I never said anything that—”

“You know about Morris’s situation,” Howard says grimly.

“He doesn’t tell me everything.”

“But you
know
.”

“I know what they’re looking into, okay. How could I not know? Morris is going out of his mind about it, thinking sooner or later it’s going to come out, that Goldsmith will implicate him.”

So she did know.

Howard had never been able to persuade Morris not to discuss political liabilities with his wife. He’d clearly told her how Barton Goldsmith, the CIA director, had involved Sawchuck in
his plan to cut deals with a handful of terrorism suspects. Goldsmith argued he was doing it to protect the people of the United States, but it turned out the people of the United States didn’t quite see it that way after the
New York Times
did an exposé on how Goldsmith had leaned on various prosecutors and law enforcement agencies across the country to allow certain terror suspects to walk in return for information.

Like those two nut jobs who were about to set off a bomb in a Florida theme park when they were nabbed. The moment he was notified of the arrests, Goldsmith was leaning on Florida’s highest-ranking law enforcement officials to hold the two men until his people arrived. Goldsmith’s intelligence experts said something much bigger was coming, and those clowns in Florida agreed to tell everything they knew in return for a couple of air tickets back to Yemen. (The U.S. government even paid their airfare home, the
Times
noted, a fact that rankled almost as much as the prospect of the devastation they nearly caused.)

Goldsmith credited the deal with thwarting another underwear/shoe-type bomber before he boarded a Washington-bound plane in Paris. But the
Times
story could find no definitive link between the two events. It suggested Goldsmith was inflating the value of the intel he’d received from the two theme park terrorists to justify sending them home.

Goldsmith was pilloried. He resigned. Florida’s attorney general followed.

What the
Times
didn’t know was that Florida was not the first such incident.

A Saudi illegal with al Qaeda sympathies had tried to set off a Ford F-150 filled with explosives around the corner from the Guggenheim. He’d parked it in the middle of the night and set it to go off at nine in the morning. But a woman looking out her brownstone window wondered why he kept checking something in the truck’s cargo bed, and called the police. A tactical team
arrived and disabled the device before the bagel carts had set up for business. The truck was traced to its owner, the man arrested. Goldsmith was in the loop from the beginning, scooped the suspect, found out he had a bunch of similar-minded friends he was willing to roll on, all in return for a trip home.

Goldsmith called Morris.

Morris balked at first. He’d prosecute the son of a bitch. Told Goldsmith he wasn’t interested in making deals with terrorists. Goldsmith said, “You know, terror suspects aren’t the only people we have a lot of background intel on, if you get my meaning.”

There wasn’t an ambitious politician alive who didn’t have secrets he hoped were buried forever. Morris Sawchuck could only have guessed what Goldsmith might have had on him. Knowledge, perhaps, of one or more dirty tricks Howard had performed on his behalf. Campaign donations that hadn’t gone through channels. Maybe even something about Bridget’s sexual history. Or even his own.

Sawchuck allowed himself to be overruled.

The bomber went home.

When the
Times
story broke, Howard and Morris waited for the other shoe to drop. The
Times
would keep digging and find out Morris had caved. They could see the headlines: “New York AG Allows Guggenheim Bomber to Skip Country.”

It would have finished him.

No one who let terrorists go free got to the governor’s mansion, let alone the White House. Morris would have been lucky to serve on the board of a community college after this got out.

It is all this, Howard fears, that Allison Fitch has heard Bridget talking about on the phone with Morris.

“Jesus Christ, Bridget, how stupid are you?” Howard shakes his head. “How stupid is Morris?”

“He never talked about anything specific. Everything was in
general terms. Just that he’s worried. That he hopes all this will blow over soon.”

“That’s the thing, Bridget. We think it’s all going to blow over soon. There’s a very good chance this will all go away.” His voice is very low. “But not if you start blabbing about it on the phone, where some blackmailing lesbo bimbo can hear you.”

“Howard, really, she’s bluffing. She never heard anything. I’m sure of it.”

He turns, takes two steps away from her, turns and looks at her again. He approaches and says, “The blackmail thing—I could see us getting out from under that. But if this woman really heard something, she’s got information that trumps some girl-on-girl action. She’s got dynamite. You understand what I’m saying, Bridget? She has dynamite. She has a goddamn nuclear weapon.”

“Howard, honestly, I’m sure, even if she heard every word I said, she never heard anything that would—”

“Enough,” he says. “Enough.” He shakes his head slowly, thinking. He points a finger at her and says, “Not one word to Morris. Not one single word.”

Then, abruptly, he leaves her there, striding out of the lobby to the sidewalk and heading east.

Bridget braces herself against the wall, tries to regain her composure. Howard doesn’t have to worry that she’ll tell Morris. He scares her far more than her husband does.

NINETEEN

“THE
FBI sent some people to talk to me, Mr. President.”

“Yes, of course, that makes sense.”

“Did you send them?”

“It’s standard procedure.”

“Okay. Because they weren’t friendly. They asked if I’d ever been in trouble.”

“What did you say?”

“They knew about the time that I saw Mrs. Hitchens naked. But they didn’t know about the other thing.”

“And you didn’t tell them.”

“No. And I think they meant the kind of trouble where I was the one who did the bad thing. But it wasn’t my fault. I don’t like to talk about it. Dad wanted to talk about it just before he died, wanted me to talk about it. It was very confusing, because for years and years he wouldn’t let me talk about it, to anyone. And I never did. Not even Dr. Grigorin knows.”

“I know.”

“It’s safe, telling you.”

“What about your brother? Should you tell him?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

TWENTY

DRIVING
home, Michael Lambton wants some.

He can go home and get it—just shake Vera so that she wakes up enough to roll onto her back—but that’s not really what he has in mind. This is a celebration, after all. If you’re going to celebrate, do you really want the same piece of ass you can get any day of the week?

And this is definitely a cause for celebration. He’s pulled it off. At least, it sure as hell looks as though he’s pulled it off. The vote’s this coming Sunday, and all indications are the dumb bastards are going to approve it. Narrowly, probably, but they’re going to ratify a contract that gives them a zero pay increase, a clawback in benefits, and no job security clauses. But they still have jobs, and they don’t want them moving to Mexico or China or Taiwan or any of those goddamn places.

They want to keep making automotive parts—door panels and dashboards and steering wheel assemblies—and shipping them off to GM and Toyota and Honda and Ford plants, not just here in the good ol’ USA but overseas, too. They’ve seen what’s been happening across this country, for years now, where the jobs
are going. And when these jobs leave, are they ever coming back? Not fucking likely.

That is what Lambton tells them when he presents the company’s offer. He calls it “piss poor.” He calls it “a motherfucking insult.” He calls it “a punch to the gut of each and every hardworking man and woman in this plant.”

He calls it all those things. He also calls it “our best hope of keeping our jobs.”

“Let’s face it, folks. These sons of bitches can close up shop and be set up in Asswipe, South Korea, before you’ve even gotten home from the evening shift, cracked open a beer, and put on Leno. Do I like this contract? I
hate
this contract. And I’m here to tell you tonight, as your union leader, that on Sunday I am going to be voting for this piece of shit contract. You know why? Because I’m a realist. Because I got mouths to feed, and I know you do, too. Because I got a mortgage to pay, and I know you do, too. Because I got kids to send to school, and I know you do, too. Because I got people who depend on me, each and every day, and I know you do, too.”

There’s grumbling in the union hall, but it isn’t as bad as Lambton fears it will be. There was a time when they’d have been throwing chairs at him. But that was then, when there was still a Pontiac and an Oldsmobile division. Before Hummer and Saturn got sold off. Before Chrysler nearly went tits up. This is now. It’s a whole new ball game. And even though there are signs things are coming back, that the big car companies are going to be buying parts from this particular manufacturing plant for the foreseeable future, people are still nervous. They don’t want to derail this recovery. They want to keep their homes.

They know, in their hearts, that Michael Lambton is right. They don’t like hearing what he has to say, but they know he’s a no-bullshit kind of guy. They know Michael Lambton is looking
out for them. They know Michael Lambton is a straight shooter.