Jim McGill 02 The Hangman's Companion Read online

“What’s that?”

  “I’m dissatisfied with the lack of progress the Secret Service is making in finding out who shot Special Agent Ky.”

  The president, as caring a wife as a man might want, was also trying hard not to let concern for her husband’s wellbeing distract her from the burdens of her office. This was despite McGill having only his driver, Leo Levy, as an armed companion. For the past six months, he’d had no Secret Service protection whatsoever.

  McGill had said he’d be okay until Deke was fit to return to duty, and he’d worked several small cases in that time without so much as blistering a lip. SAC Celsus Crogher, chief of the White House security detail, however, had seen his hair go completely white from the stress of pushing the team investigating Deke’s shooting—and worrying the president’s husband, code name Holmes, might get his sorry ass shot.

  McGill shrugged. “Patti, some cases are stainless steel whodunits.”

  The Secret Service had looked at all the militant antiabortionists whose ilk had been responsible for the death of Patti’s first husband, philanthropist Andrew Hudson Grant, had threatened McGill’s children, and when that was deemed beyond the pale had turned their hostile gaze towards the president’s henchman himself. But that avenue of investigation had met a dead end. As for the possibility Deke’s shooting had been the product of personal enmity, that hadn’t led anywhere either. He was the dutiful son of a single mother, and almost monastic in his lifestyle.

  “So you’re content to let the investigation proceed under its current leadership?” the president asked.

  “If your favor was to let me take the reins, no thank you.”

  McGill was not about to join the federal government in any capacity.

  Other than being married to the woman who headed it.

  “I thought you might be more motivated to bring things to a conclusion.”

  McGill said, “Believe me, Patti, no one could be more motivated than Deke’s brother and sister agents. Look at Celsus. This thing is literally eating him up. One day soon, if we don’t catch a break, there’ll be nothing left of him but his scowl sitting atop his brogans.”

  “He worries about you, too,” the president said.

  “He’s pissed at me because I won’t follow orders.”

  The president knew she’d get nowhere debating that point.

  “So will you help me? Teach me a little Dark Alley?”

  “Be happy to. Sorry I can’t do more.”

  She still hadn’t told him why the best protected woman on earth felt the need to know how to personally bust someone’s chops. That remained a mystery.

  But he was a detective.

  One who always liked a good challenge.

  4

  It helped that Patti was fit, well-coordinated, and possessed a fair portion of fast-twitch muscle fiber. Quickness was also McGill’s greatest physical gift. But mastering Dark Alley required more than athleticism; it demanded a deep ruthlessness.

  Which anyone who made it to the Oval Office, even McGill’s dear wife, had in spades. Politics, though, for all its back stabbing, was a bloodless exercise. Dark Alley more often than not involved the spilling of actual corpuscles.

  A primary point McGill was about to bring to the president’s attention.

  She stood across from him on a mat in the White House workout room. Three walls of mirrors bounced their reflections back at them. Both wore T-shirts, sweat pants and sneakers. The front of Patti’s shirt bore the acronym POTUS. President of the United States. McGill’s said: Totus bonus. Latin for “It’s all good.”

  His only other clean T at the moment said: Eddie’s Bar & Grill.

  Now that he thought of it, Eddie’s might have been the more apt choice.

  McGill told his new student, “Dark Alley is serious stuff. The cover charge is often broken bones. The final tab might be death. You’re not planning to assassinate anyone, are you?”

  “Don’t think so,” the president said.

  All right. That was as far as McGill would fish. But he did need some information.

  “Well, what kind of mayhem are you looking for?”

  Patti paused to formulate her needs, as if she hadn’t thought it through.

  Out of character for her.

  Then she said, “I might need to give someone bigger than me a good jolt.”

  “How much bigger?” McGill asked. “Big as me?”

  He was six-one, carrying one-eighty these days.

  “In the neighborhood, yes.”

  A man most likely then, McGill decided, saying nothing.

  “You want this jolt to leave the person standing or knock him down?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you show me both?”

  McGill nodded. “You want to go for the throat? Cause a real scare?”

  POTUS recoiled at the idea, horror written on her face.

  “Maybe we’ll save that for later,” McGill said. “It’s easy to go too far with that one.”

  Patti advanced to the spot from which she’d retreated.

  “Jim, I will let you know what this is all about as soon as I can, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s start with an old favorite called the foot-trap.”

  “One other thing,” the president said, “I might have to use what you’re going to teach me while there are cameras present and rolling. Whatever I do has to look like an accident.”

  The president’s henchman nodded and took that into consideration.

  Sunday Evening—Paris

  5

  Investigating Magistrate Yves Pruet sat on the large flower filled balcony of his apartment four floors above the Quai Anatole France quietly playing Variations from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Movement Number Two on his Alhambra classical guitar. It was a melancholy piece, and his playing captured perfectly both the composer’s intent and his own mood. His fingers moved without conscious thought over the strings of the instrument that had been his near constant companion since his days at the Sorbonne.

  Midway through the piece a large, menacing shadow fell across the tiles at Pruet’s feet. He ignored it and kept playing.

  “Yves, please,” a deep voice said, “your virtuosity is unquestioned, but if you continue, I will begin to weep.”

  With a chuckle the magistrate stopped playing and looked over his shoulder. He saw his friend and police bodyguard, Odo Sacripant, a block of Corsican granite carved into eccentric planes of muscle by many a fight. Odo never wept at anything, except when his wife, Marie, presented him with another child.

  “The time has come?” Pruet asked.

  “As we both knew it must,” Odo answered.

  The magistrate placed his guitar in its stand and went to the balcony’s railing. He looked out at the nearby Seine from his Left Bank vantage point. The current criticism of the Rive Gauche was that what was once the bastion of the city’s artists had become the refuge of its bourgeoisie. The artists had been pushed across the river to less expensive enclaves.

  Pruet took such critiques philosophically. He was still free to play his guitar here, express his art. And he appreciated his rising property value.

  Odo said, “You are looking emaciated, Yves. You need to eat more.”

  Approaching fifty, Pruet had once been a bit plump, but now his rumpled sandy hair, smart blue eyes, and genial smile resided in and around a visage gone gaunt. His clothes hung loosely on his reduced frame.

  He turned to look at Odo. “I have gone on the Alienated Wife Diet.”

  “Nicolette never cooked for you or anyone else,” the bodyguard pointed out.

  “True, but she dragged me to every expensive restaurant in Paris.”

  Odo took a seat at a glass-topped table.

  “Whenever you are ready, mon ami.”

  Pruet reluctantly joined him at the table.

  “The American is ready for you to examine,” Odo said.

  “There is no chance he will make things easier for me and die?”

&
nbsp; Odo shook his head.

  “Remind me of his name,” Pruet said.

  “Glen Kinnard from Chicago.”

  “And he came all the way to Paris to kill France’s most celebrated football star.”

  “That was not his intent, he says.”

  “But it was the result,” Pruet said. “That and to make us miserable.”

  “Such would seem to be our lot in life.”

  Pruet had become infamous for sending a former interior minister to prison. The man had been stealing government funds on a scale that couldn’t be ignored. Everyone had expected the fellow to be sacked. To live out his life in disgrace in some remote outpost of French culture. But if that were allowed to happen it would have meant the thief would be allowed to take a goodly part of his booty with him and enjoy the life of a tropical potentate. Any claim that the man had been punished would have been a vile joke.

  So Pruet had presented a case to the court so meticulously documented and so persuasively argued that the judge had no choice but to send the miscreant to prison for twenty years. A period likely to encapsulate the remainder of his life. Such a sentence was unprecedented in modern France. The high and the mighty were not supposed to face such harsh realities.

  Once the precedent had been established, though, the thief’s friends and colleagues at the top of the government and society came to fear Pruet. To loathe him. To plot his demise.

  Now, he’d been presented with another disastrous case.

  If his investigation were to result in this American, Glen Kinnard from Chicago, spending the remainder of his life in a French prison, that decision could very well rupture the warming relations between France and the United States.

  If his investigation exculpated Kinnard, it wouldn’t be only the habitués of the haut monde who would seek vengeance on Pruet. Every Frenchman who cheered for les bleus—the national football team—would come for him with blood in their eyes.

  Pruet sighed and said, “My father wanted me to go into the family business.”

  “You are allergic to cheese. How could you spend your life making it?”

  “I don’t know,” Pruet said. “But I should have tried harder.”

  Chapter 3

  Monday, June 1st — Washington, DC

  1

  The president was at her desk in the Oval Office by five a.m. She had more reading to do than a class of law school students cramming for final exams. Tomorrow, she and the circus that accompanied her everywhere she traveled would depart for the G8 summit in London. The president was routinely described as the most powerful person in the world, but the one thing she could never do was travel light. She required two highly modified Boeing 747-200Bs, known as SAM 28000 and SAM 29000, more commonly referred to as Air Force One whenever she was aboard one of them. A C-130 cargo aircraft would bring her personal helicopter, a VH60N WhiteHawk, Marine One when she was aboard, and two armored Cadillac limousines, previously called The Beasts, renamed by the president in a Seussian moment as Thing One and Thing Two.

  That was just the hardware. The senior advisers, their support staff, the Secret Service contingent, the military personnel, the White House press corps, and special guests approached a number that a convention planner would have been hard put to deal with. In fact, the White House had its own travel planners. You didn’t just throw together a trip for POTUS.

  There was, of course, one other traveling companion for this president.

  Her henchman.

  Patti winced as she shifted her weight on the seat of her desk chair.

  Jim had been gentle with her, showing her the Dark Alley techniques she’d asked to learn, but he had insisted she have at least some understanding of the pain she might inflict on others. Even so, Jim had stressed that knowing the damage she might do must not inhibit her from inflicting it if necessary. You did what you had to do, and reflexively, if your own precious hide was at risk.

  He’d given her a wintry smile and said, “There are even times, harsh as it may sound, when you’re pleased to know the price some jerk has paid for messing with you.”

  All in all, the president thought her husband’s approach to the use of force was well considered for someone in her line of work.

  With that in mind, Patti took out her personal iPhone, an instrument she’d insisted she had the right to retain, and placed a call to California, where it was still the middle of the night. She needed to talk with an old friend, a fellow former actress, who stayed up late. Her friend, the closest thing the president had to a sister, had accepted an appointment from the preceding administration as an honorary cultural ambassador to the UN. Her duties had taken her to countries around the world where her beautiful face and charming personality had made several friends for the United States. This was at a time when the occupant of the White House had been creating legions of the disaffected.

  For the most part, the friend’s efforts may well have created a wealth of good memories for her, but Patti had heard a rumor of one disturbing story that, if true, could have blighted the whole experience. News of the event had only a limited circulation as far as the president knew, and that was within the pinnacle of the acting community. It hadn’t reached the Washington gossip mills at all. Not yet.

  Patti’s call was answered on the second ring, and the conversation began with a warmth usually reserved for family. It continued for the next fifteen minutes, spoken entirely in French.

  Just as it was drawing to a close, there was a knock at the door.

  The president, caught up in Francophony, said, “Entrez.”

  2

  Entrez?

  The president was speaking French, Chief of Staff Galia Mindel wondered as she entered the Oval Office. She saw Patti was on her personal phone as she closed the door behind her. The president also had an open briefing book on her lap, one of the volumes provided to Patti that contained biographical information on the other heads of state with whom she’d be meeting at the G8 gathering in London.

  Galia had been one of the people who had advocated that the president not use a personal phone, and the mere idea that Patti might have been sharing information from a presidential briefing book with someone outside the government — someone not approved of by Galia herself—it was all the chief of staff could do not to wince.

  And why had the president been speaking in French?

  Patti said, “Au revoir,” and ended her call.

  Turning her attention to her chief of staff, she asked, “Everything well in hand for our departure tomorrow?”

  The president closed the briefing book and put it and her iPhone in a desk drawer before Galia could see whose bio Patti had been reading.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Galia said, crossing the room to stand before the president. Patti nodded to a chair and the chief of staff sat. Reading Galia’s expression was not a challenge.

  “If all our ducks are in a row, why the frown?” the president asked.

  Never one to be a shrinking violet, even when addressing the president, the chief of staff was having a hard time finding her voice. Or perhaps the right words.

  “Galia, what is it?” the president wanted to know.

  Despite the second prompt, it was all Galia could do just to meet the president’s eye.

  In a flash of intuition, Patti knew what was bothering her most senior adviser.

  “Oh my God, Galia. Is this about me and Jean-Louis Severin?”

  Monsieur Severin being the president of France. He’d been elected the year before Patricia Darden Grant had been sent to the White House by the American people. The two of them had spent a year together at Yale. More than that, they’d appeared together in a student-written production that ended with the two of them kissing.

  They hadn’t seen each other in all the years since, but M’sieur le Président had been the first foreign head of state to call and congratulate his old school chum on her election. In fact, he’d placed his call on Election Night before Patti had the electoral
votes to put her over the top. Everyone in the Grant campaign was sure their candidate would win, but nobody dared to say so, not wanting to jinx things at the last minute. Jean-Louis Severin hadn’t worried about such a trifling superstition. He knew his friend would win and wanted to be the first to say, “Grèle au Chef.” Hail to the Chief.

  Galia hadn’t wanted to let the call go through, but she knew she’d catch hell if she didn’t. So the candidate renewed acquaintances with her old friend, speaking to him in French, shutting Galia out of the conversation. Not that it lasted long. But Galia detected a warmth in Patti’s tone that she rarely heard outside of her speaking to James J. McGill or his children. When the conversation ended, Patti asked Galia, “Would you like to know what Jean-Louis said?”

  “Of course not,” Galia replied. “It was obviously a personal conversation.”

  “I don’t intend to tell you everything, Galia. But Jean-Louis predicted Minnesota was going to fall our way and the networks would call the decision as soon as the polls closed.”

  Minnesota would put them over the top? But it was the incumbent’s home state and hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Nonetheless, the prediction of the president of France was right on the money.

  Always made Galia wonder if the man had gotten a bet down on Patti.

  “Yes, Madam President,” Galia said, answering the question at hand, “I’m afraid it is.”

  The president sighed and sat back in her chair.

  “Well, people do like their fantasies,” she said. “Like to project themselves into…”

  Imagining they were one half of the fantasy couple, Galia understood.

  Still, she said, “President Severin is recently divorced. You and he are old friends. You are both heads of state. You’re going to meet in a historic city after a separation of many years.”

  Patti sighed. “Hollywood couldn’t write a better scenario.”

  The chief of staff nodded. “A friend in the press gave me a confidential heads-up.” Meaning the president shouldn’t ask for a name. “Certain newspapers are going to give your relationship with President Severin bigger play than the G8 summit.”