Jim McGill 04 The Last Ballot Cast, Part 2 Read online

  McGill took a seat opposite Penrose and told him, “Damon Todd tried, one night, to club me to death with a baseball bat. I had a gun and could have shot him but I didn’t. I’ve come to think that might have been a mistake. If you can help us find him, maybe we can work things out so no one will have to shoot him.”

  McGill got to his feet and gestured to DeWitt to leave the room with him.

  Closing the door, McGill heard Penrose ask Cheveyo, “How can I know if he was telling me the truth?”

  Cheveyo said, “I was there at the end. Mr. McGill had a gun. Dr. Todd didn’t and —

  The door closed.

  DeWitt asked McGill, “You think Dr. Cheveyo will get anything out of him?”

  “I don’t know. My guess is Todd’s instruction set for Penrose will hold up only if it doesn’t violate deeper beliefs. That’s the way I’ve seen it work.”

  “You think about it, Todd could have helped the CIA and a lot of other people.”

  “Todd never helped anyone without exacting a price.”

  Sex or money, McGill knew, depending on the circumstances.

  DeWitt told him, “I probably would have shot the guy, if I’d been in your shoes.”

  McGill said, “If you wear the right size, I’ll lend you a pair.”

  Department of Justice Building — Washington, D.C.

  Attorney General Michael Jaworsky read through the contract Ethan Judd had brought him. When he finished he laid it on his desk and placed his reading glasses atop it. He looked at the newsman sitting opposite him.

  “What do you think I should do with this, Mr. Judd?” Jaworsky asked.

  “Whatever your professional ethics dictate, Mr. Attorney General.”

  “You’re just being a good citizen here?”

  “I’m being a good reporter. Ms. Ellie Booker brought that contract to me. She said she construes it to be an attempted bribe. She also said she was going to bring it to the attention of your office. Whether she has, I don’t know and won’t ask — for now. I only wanted to make sure you are aware of it.”

  “Why now? Because the investigation into Sir Edbert’s business dealings is about to conclude?”

  “Yes. If I’d brought this to you sooner, it might have been just another snowflake in a blizzard.”

  Jaworsky chuckled. “So you think Sir Edbert might soon be facing an array of charges brought by the federal government?”

  “If you’re asking whether I have any inside information about what you’re going to do, the answer is no. You run a tight ship here.”

  “We try, Mr. Judd. Are you planning to leave your new job so soon?”

  Judd leaned forward, “Mr. Attorney General, talking to you and bringing you that contract will be the least of my offenses against Sir Edbert. I’m going to air the story of my employer offering a million-dollars-for-nothing contract to Ms. Booker. I thought I’d time my story to run in concert with the conclusion of your investigation of Sir Edbert.”

  “No doubt, you’ll be fired for that,” Jaworsky said.

  “No doubt at all, but I’ve already shown the country what a return to objective television news looks like. My guess is I’ve whetted the public’s appetite for more. If I’m to be a part of the renaissance, bully for me. If not, I’ll write a book.”

  Jaworsky nodded. “I’ve enjoyed what you’ve done with WWN. I wish you luck. May I hold on to this contract or should I have copies made? I’d like to get a few opinions on its relevance to our investigation.”

  Judd stood and said, “It’s all yours. I’ve made all the copies I need. Oh, there’s one more thing. You might want to pass it along to the president.”

  “What’s that?” Jaworsky asked.

  Judd told him about the coming launch of WorldWide News in Review and how Mike O’Dell would be its leading voice.

  “I’m sure you won’t let it influence your legal judgment, but Sir Edbert and friends don’t mean to go down without taking the president down with them.”

  Penrose House — Charlottesville, Virginia

  Daryl Cheveyo found McGill and DeWitt outside, leaning against McGill’s Chevy.

  Leo Levy stood twenty yards away talking to an FBI agent who was into cars.

  “Anything?” McGill asked.

  Cheveyo shook his head. Not evincing a lack of success, but a sense of wonder.

  “It was like nothing I’ve experienced.”

  “Penrose is okay, though, right?” DeWitt asked.

  “He’s sleeping like a baby. I’m the one who’s going to need a sedative tonight.”

  “What happened?” McGill said.

  “Well, I injected him with ketamine hydrochloride, a small dose to reduce the risk of emergence delirium. He seemed to tolerate it well. I’ll go back inside in a few minutes to make sure he doesn’t have any problems.”

  “Did he open up to you?” DeWitt asked.

  “He was happy to talk. I brought out my iPad. It can play a series of video loops that help a subject enter a hypnotic state. There’s a flickering flame dancing up and down, a row of tulips swaying back and forth in a breeze, and other things like that. I asked the professor to tell me when he saw one he liked. He went with highway lane divider stripes passing under a car from a driver’s perspective.”

  “Highway hypnosis,” McGill said.

  “Right. When he was nice and relaxed, receptive to my voice, I asked him to go back to the first time he’d met Todd. He began to stutter and get very anxious. Told me he never wanted to go through that again. I brought him forward to the time when he’d overcome the speech impediment. I asked how Todd knew what to do to help him.

  “He said, ‘Doctor Todd just knew what I needed.’ He couldn’t explain it any better than that. He told me his parents had brought him to Todd, and I’m sure they gave Todd their take on their son’s life, but that narrative would have been biased, edited and untutored in psychological understanding. For Todd to have elicited information from a fearful young man that would allow him to construct a stable, well-integrated personality able not only to cope with a previously frightening world, but also succeed in it while overcoming a lifelong handicap … that’s a masterful achievement.”

  Cheveyo sighed. “When I first met Damon Todd, I thought he was a crank. Now, I’d like to gather all his subjects in one room and listen to how he managed to assist them.”

  McGill said, “Don’t forget he kills people. You might ask why he couldn’t help himself.”

  DeWitt, not having any history with Todd, was able to keep his eye on the ball.

  “Did Penrose tell you anything that might help us catch Todd?”

  “Maybe. He said Todd told him he would probably need more money from him.”

  McGill liked that. “Then all we’ll have to do is follow the money.”

  Wingsuit Flying — 12,000 Feet Above Baja California

  Damon Todd followed his instructor, Jaime Martinez, out of the plane. Crosby and Anderson jumped after Todd. Martinez was an old friend of the covert operatives and they’d all paid close attention to his instructions. There’d be no screwing around here like there was up in the Mojave Desert.

  Wingsuit flying was both trickier and more exhilarating than normal skydiving.

  The wingsuit was sewn with areas of fabric between the legs and from the arms to the torso. When the flyer’s arms and legs were extended the surface areas adjacent to his body expanded, making him look like a flying squirrel. That significantly decreased the speed at which a belly-to-earth flyer fell and extended the range he could glide. The standard ratio was two point five meters forward for every meter downward.

  But you couldn’t just spread your arms and legs as you left the plane. There was a little matter called relative wind to consider. Relative wind was generated by the forward speed of the aircraft. If the wind popped open the flying suit’s gliding surfaces, it could propel a flyer into a collision with the plane. Even if that fatal mishap didn’t occur, the thrust of relative wind could
launch a flyer into an unstable start to his flight.

  Because a flying suit lacked a vertical stabilizer even poor technique could send a flier into a spin from which it would be difficult to emerge and regain control.

  Despite these potentially mortal hazards, Todd had never done anything so thrilling in his life. It was addictive from the first moment. He saw the world from the perspective of a god. The speed of the flight and the rush of cold air stimulated every nerve ending in his body. He didn’t say anything to the others about it, but he got hard as he flew.

  It was all he could do not to ejaculate.

  Below was the blue Pacific and the dun dangle of the Baja California peninsula. Details of ocean and earth were flattened by the great height of the jump altitude, but they came into progressively sharper relief as Todd streaked downward.

  More than the view was breathtaking, though. The way the world became ever more clear to his eyes bore an uncanny resemblance to the way the minds of Todd’s subjects became progressively more clear to him.

  What started as an undifferentiated mass of anxieties, inhibitions and even self-loathing resolved itself into a neat sequence of traumas, abuse and misfortunes. Discovering where the fault lines of the mind intersected and how deeply they cut gave him the clues he needed to rebuild and if necessary reroute the ways his subjects saw themselves. It was never easy, but when the patients told him what their goals were he had an intuitive sense of how to start the therapy. From there, it was a matter of seeing —

  Jaime tapping the altimeter on his wrist.

  Todd looked at his own altimeter. It was time to open his parachute. He did so, thinking it wasn’t at all a good idea to get distracted while falling out of the sky. Even in a wingsuit, you’d still become a blob to be sponged up by some poor soul who’d curse you for a fool.

  The planned landing zone was the beach directly below. Drifting to earth, Todd watched Jaime, who still hadn’t opened his chute. The man all but danced on air. The way he maneuvered in flight was a sight to behold, both artistic and athletic. At so low an altitude that Todd would have been yelling for help, Jaime’s parachute blossomed and he hit the beach running.

  He stopped just short of the water, turned and spotted his companions about to land safely. A good jump for everyone. Jaime stepped over to a cooler ten feet from where he’d touched down. He’d left it on the beach before takeoff. He lifted the lid and had a cold bottle of beer open for everyone by the time they joined him.

  The four men toasted each other’s skill and bravery.

  The gringos were fortunate to have reached Jaime Martinez while he was still alive. He was in robust physical health, but he was a man on a suicide mission. His beloved wife, Nalda, had left him for a lieutenant in the Baja Cartel named Elvio Mora.

  She hadn’t left Jaime because she loved Mora. She left because Mora was a man who got whatever he wanted, and he wanted Nalda. He told her that if she didn’t live with him and please him greatly he would kill Jaime, everyone who shared a bloodline with him and all their animals.

  Of course, Mora told Nalda, if Jaime were truly a man he would try to take his woman back.

  That was close to what Jaime had in mind. His plan was to buy a plane and a bomb, and now he had nearly all the money he needed. He would fly the plane over Mora’s hilltop fortress on the night of the great fiesta the drug boss gave to celebrate his birthday. The narco-trafficantes were enthusiastic participants in any form of savagery that might come to mind, but as of yet they hadn’t thought to use airplanes for bombing missions.

  But Jaime had.

  He didn’t intend to drop his bomb from his plane nor did he intend to crash the plane into Mora’s hacienda. He planned to strap the bomb to his chest and fall from the sky like a comet. There would be no need for a parachute on this jump. He would spot Mora from above and take him like a raptor seizing a rabbit, detonating his bomb as he sank his teeth into the coward’s stinking flesh.

  “I like it,” Anderson said, hearing the plan.

  “Calls for great intel and pinpoint execution,” Crosby opined.

  “I can help you with the focus you’ll need for the execution,” Todd told him.

  Jaime looked at Todd. He liked the way the new gringo paid respect to him and careful attention to his instructions. For one so new to wingsuit flying, Todd had shown no fear and save for letting his mind wander for a moment he had done well.

  “What do you want for helping me?”

  Todd said, “I have someone I’d like to see die, too. Crosby and Anderson have told me they’d like to try to get the job done. If either of them succeeds, I’ll help you free of charge. If they fail, I’ll see if I can do it. If that’s the case, I think you might be able to help me.”

  “A favor for a favor. Bueno.”

  The bargain was sealed with an embrace.

  Everyone felt good until the americanos tried to find their shiny gold truck.

  It was gone. All that remained were its license plates.

  Front Page — Washington Post

  The photo showed James J. McGill stepping out of the White House, walking with the aid of a cane. The headline said, “President’s Husband Suffers from Old Knee Injury.” The accompanying story detailed how years earlier as a captain of the Chicago Police Department McGill had given chase to and caught a purse snatcher while off duty and visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo with his children and former wife, Carolyn Enquist.

  In tackling the thief, McGill suffered an injury to his right knee.

  The story had all of that right. In making the arrest, while wearing walking shorts, McGill had skinned his knee. In a moment of overzealousness, the rookie paramedic attending to him that day had bandaged the scrape as if her binding was the only thing keeping his leg in one piece. McGill had taken a good deal of ribbing after a photo had been snapped of his over-wrapped leg.

  Now, that image appeared on an inside page of the Post’s front section.

  Only the description of the injury McGill had suffered was now an avulsion of the patellar tendon, an injury that had required surgery and physical therapy to repair. Government disinformation. It went unchallenged, for the most part, because McGill’s medical history, just like anyone else’s, was protected by the privacy rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

  The lie might have been contested by anyone who had seen McGill’s bare, unscarred knee in the intervening years, but there was no great worry on McGill’s part that a whistle-blower would come forward, and he didn’t intend to drop his pants for anyone except the president.

  The story would have been beneath media notice for anyone without first rank celebrity standing. Even for McGill, it was only a few paragraphs and a couple of small photos, but it was widely distributed and briefly commented upon by the mainstream media. That was good enough to make the jump to the Internet.

  One blogger even guessed the truth. It was all a fake-out. But that anti-administration voice ascribed the wrong motive to McGill’s gambit. He thought it was a ploy for sympathy on the part of the president’s husband. To show the public what a trooper he was as he went on his political rounds speaking as Patti Grant’s chief surrogate.

  Look at him up there with his bum leg. What a guy. I’ll vote for his wife.

  It was unfortunate that anyone would question the authenticity of the illusion, but the blogger had the reputation as a crackpot and wasn’t widely read. Some critics simply had to be ignored.

  The people who were in on the gag, Carolyn and the kids especially, had been briefed to go along with it or better yet to say a person’s medical history was nobody else’s business.

  In any event, McGill would be presenting himself to the world with either a curved handle cane or curved handle unbreakable umbrella in hand until Damon Todd and friends were no longer a threat.

  Elspeth and Sweetie had seen what McGill could do with the umbrella.

  He also gave a demonstration to Deke, who was back on
board, and to Celsus Crogher.

  Crogher had asked, “Can you bat away bullets with either of those things?”

  McGill conceded he probably wasn’t that quick.

  He added, “It gets down to shooting, I’ll leave things to Deke or Elspeth.”

  “Or me,” Sweetie said.

  She was present to see more of her old friend’s Dark Alley magic.

  “Or Margaret,” McGill said.

  6

  April, 2012

  White House Press Room

  Aggie Wu announced the arrival of the president and the newsies got to their feet just like they’d all been raised indoors by parents who valued good manners. Such propriety was a now and then thing when reporters questioned most public figures. What was constant at the White House was their fear of the press secretary.

  You were on your best manners when speaking to the president or you looked for another beat to work. Some editors and publishers complained that Aggie had a chilling effect on the free press. Informed of that evaluation, the president had her own take.

  “Don’t think of Aggie as chilling, think of her as air conditioning. She keeps the press room from overheating.” Aggie had a plaque made from those words.

  Now, the president said, “Good morning. As you all know, there are two vacancies on the Supreme Court. Some people think any reduction of the federal government is a good thing …”

  The president paused for and got a laugh.

  “I feel, however, the court operates best with a full complement of justices. With that thought in mind, I’m here to inform the country of my nominations to fill the Supreme Court’s vacancies. I’m sure my choices will not please everyone. Given our current state of political disharmony, I doubt there breathes a soul who could please us all.

  “What I looked for in making my choices was to find two individuals who understand that the Constitution is a body of law that must be as vibrantly alive as the country itself. The principles articulated in the Constitution must be interpreted to deal with situations that its authors never could have imagined.