by Meg Gardiner
“Look who’s talking—the champion of gamesmanship. Don’t deny it, darlin’. I remember your toast at Rob and Tasia’s wedding. But there aren’t any prizewinners here. Tasia’s dead.”
Lewicki stepped back. The breeze carried street sounds through the open window. Abruptly he turned and leaned an ear toward the glass.
Vienna softened her glare. “Kel, if you won’t do this for Tasia, do it for me.”
He had gone as silent as a gargoyle. He held up a hand to quiet her.
“What?” she said.
He took out his phone. Before he could push any buttons, it rang. He turned his back on Jo and Vienna. “Lewicki.”
Vienna put her hands on her hips, annoyed. Jo, feeling confused and curious, tried to catch her eye, but Vienna waved her off.
“Yeah, Bill. I’ll have them take me straight to Grace Cathedral . . . what? No, just . . .” He looked out the window again. “Thought I heard something. Popping sound. But everything’s all right?”
He listened, and snorted. “Call her Senate office. We’ll go to the Hill ourselves when I get back.” He beckoned Vienna. “I may need videoconferencing capability. Does that TV have a cable hookup for telepresence?”
He pointed at the plasma screen above the credenza. Vienna looked ready to slap his butt clean through the wall.
With a sharp knock, the receptionist opened the door. Dana Jean’s easily surprised face looked unusually subdued. “Sorry to disturb you. Vienna, the car’s here to take you to the service.”
“All right.”
Dana Jean left. Vienna crossed to the window and stared at Lewicki until he lowered the phone.
“I’m leaving you and Jo to your argument. I have my sister’s funeral to attend.” Her expression was piquant. “I’ll be waiting at the church, with your boss, when you finish hashing this out. And you will.” She stepped closer. “I’m short a pallbearer. I know you cared for Tasia. I need to find a man who can carry something heavy.”
Vienna let her stare linger on Lewicki. He actually blanched. She turned and swept out the door, trailing the scent of roses.
Abashed, Lewicki glanced at Jo. He raised a finger, mouthed, One minute, and spoke into the phone. “Bill?”
He turned back to the window, speaking rapid-fire.
Steamed, Jo looked at the music on the conference table. She was close, she felt it, almost like she could touch the meaning with her fingertips. And Lewicki was close to walking out.
After me . . .
Chord progression. A minor. C major. A third chord, she couldn’t decipher by sight. She put her fingers on the notes.
E major.
She stopped. “Oh Jesus.”
She looked at the next line. The melody echoed the chord progression. The lyrics read, He wants me . . .
Beneath it was a D chord, followed by an E.
“Dead,” Jo said.
Lewicki glanced at her, eyes guarded.
She picked up the sheet music. “I’ve solved the puzzle.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tasia wrote a code into these songs. The words are the setup, the question. The notes are the answers, the payoff.” She put her index finger on the staff.” ‘After Me.’ The chord progression. Look.”
Lewicki did. “A minor, C, E.” He looked up sharply. “What?”
“Ace.” Jo scanned the next words.“ ‘He wants me.’ ”
“Ace? What are you saying? Ace Chennault? Tasia’s ghostwriter?”
“Yes. Look.” Jo punched the sheet music. “The repetitive chord progression. It’s not random. A-C-E, and then, every fourth measure, A-C-E . . .”
“With a rest, followed by another C.”
“Ace C. Ace Chennault.”
“He wants her? He was in love with her?” Lewicki said.
“No. Look at the chords.” Jo’s pulse was jumping in her veins. “D major, E major, A minor, D,” Jo said. He wants me . . . “D-E-A-D.”
Lewicki looked at her, perplexed. “This is the music Tasia left, with her ‘If you read this, I’ve been assassinated’ recording?”
“Yes.”
Jo read further through the lyrics. What’s next? Who’s next?
The air seemed to brighten. She reread the notes she’d translated from A-B-C to Do-Re-Mi.
Re-Ti-Mi-Fa-La-Do.
Re. Ti. “R. T.”
Mi. Fa. La. Do. Unfocus a bit, play loose with the spelling, and it became: M’Fa’la’d.
“R. T. McFarland,” she said. “Robert Titus McFarland.” She grabbed the music. “One thing? One reason—I got it. Tasia says in here that Ace Chennault wants her dead, and the president is next.”
Lewicki looked at Jo like her hair had just sprouted snakes. Into the phone he said, “Hold on.” He covered the receiver with his hand. “This is not a joke?”
She held up the music. He saw that she was not joking. Still, he looked skeptical. She grabbed the music for “Liar’s Lullaby.”
You say you love our land, you liar
Who dreams its end in blood and fire
Said you wanted me to be your choir
Help you build the funeral pyre.
But Robby T is not the One
All that’s needed is the gun
Load the weapon, call his name
Unlock the door, he dies in shame.
This was a puzzle too. What was the key?
Jo looked at the top of the first measure, where Tasia had written “Counterpoint/Round.” Round, round, get around. Melody, harmony, counterpoint, lyrics. The truth is in my music.
Counterpoint meant two contrasting melodies, combined. That much Jo remembered from Sister Dominica’s music class. And round—
“Damn.” Could it be as simple as that? As simple as “Frère Jacques” or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”?
She scrawled the first verse on her scratch paper, triple-spacing. Then she wrote the second verse, interspersing its lines between those of the first. The alternating lines intertwined, and a new composition appeared: the lyrics as they’d be sung in a round.
You say you love our land, you liar
But Robby T is not the One
Who dreams its end in blood and fire
All that’s needed is the gun
Said you wanted me to be your choir
Load the weapon, call his name
Help you build the funeral pyre.
Unlock the door, he dies in shame.
Jo looked at Lewicki. “It was an assassination plot. Tasia was supposed to set the president up to be killed.”
Lewicki shook his head. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Read the goddamned words. ‘You wanted me to be your choir, load the weapon, call his name, help you build the funeral pyre.’ Jesus Christ, ‘Unlock the door, he dies in shame’—she got McFarland alone in a hotel room in Virginia. That was supposed to be an opportunity for somebody to shoot the president. And she’s saying the man who lured her into setting up the meeting is still out there.”
Lewicki shook his head, but with less vehemence. “I think you’re seeing what you want to see.”
“No.” She stepped toward him. “Vienna Hicks is a formidable woman. You know that full well. Her sister was equally formidable. Her bipolar disorder didn’t make her any less intelligent or driven. And on the last night of her life, it came out in a flood of creativity.” She spread her hands. “If she wasn’t a powerhouse, do you think Robert McFarland would ever have married her?”
“Good point.”
He took the music and the scratch paper from her. Slowly, as he read over it, he inhaled. “Why would she write it out in code?”
“ ‘Load the weapon’ may refer to the Colt forty-five. Do you think she wanted to confess to being under the sway of some Rasputin who persuaded her to take a loaded gun to a meeting with the president?”
“What’s the refrain mean?” he said. “It’s got to mean something, right?”
She took the sheet music. She was so foc
used on reading the lyrics, it took a second before she realized: He believes me.
Look and see the way it ends
Who’s the liar, where’s the game
Love and death, it’s all the same
Liar’s words all end in pain
She focused. Look and see the way it ends. Ends . . . She skipped to the final verse.
I fell into your embrace
Felt tears streaming down my face
Fought the fight, ran the race
Faltered, finally fell from grace.
She whispered the words. Fell into your embrace . . . ran the race . . . face . . . grace . . .
All the same . . . “All the words end in ‘ace,’ ” she said. “Ace Chennault.”
“Are you sure?”
Liar’s words all end in pain.
“Pain,” Jo said. “Christ. It’s a reference to the guy online who calls himself Tom Paine.” She explained. “He’s a screed-master, whips extremists into a lather. Tasia’s saying that he’s actually Ace Chennault.”
Jo remembered Chennault in the hospital after Noel Petty had brained him with a rock. “He has a tattoo around his ankle. Semper T . . . ‘Always—’ ”
“Fuck,” Lewicki said. “Fuck me to shitting hell and back. Sic semper tyrannis?”
“What’s wrong?”
He pulled out his phone. “It’s what John Wilkes Booth shouted after he shot Abraham Lincoln.”
53
IVORY SIDESWIPED A PARKED TOYOTA, BOUNCED OFF WITH A SCREECH, and rebounded into a mailbox. She could barely see for the screaming in her head.
Porky Pig was down. She’d shot him. Shot the bastard in the face.
Leaving the sideswiped Toyota and the mailbox behind, she gunned the car into a parking garage. Ninety seconds, and she’d taken out a rice burner and a Gub symbol. Score three. She was on a roll.
She jammed the car into a disabled space, grabbed her bag, and jumped out. She ran into the building, some kind of office, and into the women’s room.
She stripped off her glass-spattered sweater and stuffed it into the trash. She put on her Blue Eagle Security uniform shirt. Trying to button it, she felt like an old woman playing a washboard in a jug band, her hands were shaking so hard.
Shot Porky. Shot him down.
She brushed safety-glass chips from her glorious white hair. No turning back now. She pulled on the helmet and shades, and slammed through the women’s room door. She stormed out of the office building and headed downhill, back to the skyscraper on Sacramento where the Gub Suburban was waiting.
She sent Keyes a text. Go.
The new world was about to come into being.
THE TEXT MESSAGE arrived while Ace Chennault was in line at a busy Hertz office near Union Square. His windbreaker covered the Blue Eagle Security shirt. To the other people in the queue, he looked like a guy with a sports bag, shuffling up to the counter. He didn’t look like a man loitering in public, waiting for instructions. He didn’t look like a suspicious character, the kind the Secret Service would zero in on.
He read Keyes’s message. It’s go.
The address was beneath that. Chennault felt his world expand.
Tasia had received letters from the law firm at that address, Waymire & Fong. Her sister worked there. He’d rifled through those letters, early on, hoping to unearth scraps of usable intelligence.
He stepped out of line and casually walked out. If anybody noticed him, if they caught a glimpse of his face, clothing, anything, they quickly forgot, excited by the chance to move forward an extra two feet in the line. Sheeple. Nobody had commented on the blue cast that covered his left wrist. With his baggy windbreaker, it was virtually unnoticeable.
He strode toward Sacramento Street. The wind felt bracing. With his good hand, he texted Ivory. Waymire & Fong. Vienna Hicks.
He signed it, Paine. Ace Chennault was a ghostwriter, and a ghost. Paine was Revolution, its spirit and its fuse.
He picked up his pace. This day hadn’t been in his original outline. But he’d had to work around the failure of Plan A.
Tasia had been Plan A. And her death had to be seen as a sacrifice. The sheeple who listened to talk radio and watched Edie Wilson and swallowed the hyperbolic nectar written at Tree of Liberty believed Tasia’s death to be a political murder.
And, in a perverse way, it was. The faithful saw Tasia’s death as a crucifixion. To them she was a martyr. But Tasia hadn’t been Christ. She’d been Judas.
The conspiracy theorists believed Tasia had died because she knew too much about the McFarland administration. In fact, she had died because she knew too much about the plans of people scheming to bring down the McFarland administration.
And today the hardest of the hard-core True Americans were ready to storm the Gub, on Paine’s orders. He inhaled. God almighty, power felt good.
He leaned into the wind and set his face in the buffoonishly pleasant mask that defined Ace Chennault. It was the face that had gotten people to sign up for his services as an insurance agent. It was the affable look that won him freelance gigs for current affairs and music magazines. It was the happy fanboy face that had persuaded Tasia to accept him as a music journalist and eventually her ghostwriter.
And he was a hell of a writer. He had a legitimate career, with years of publication credits. But words could never surpass his political performance art. His most recent jobs had been quiet masterpieces. Hacking into a federal appeals court justice’s cell phone to plant texts and photos from underage hookers. That got international weapons smuggling charges against a military contractor dismissed. Sending newspaper cuttings to an investigative journalist whose little boy was undergoing treatment for leukemia—stories about tragic cases in which the wrong medications had been administered and killed fragile hospital patients. That persuaded the journo to quash his investigation into links between a fundamentalist megachurch and private paramilitaries in Central America.
Subtlety had its uses.
But subtlety was mainly useful for putting money in the bank. Political violence was poetry, and Chennault was possibly the richest poet in America because his work paid big cash. That cash would finance his escape to the sunny climes where, after today, he would need to hide out for a decade or so.
Fear trilled through his stomach. He would go abroad, as Thomas Paine had done. He would take refuge while True America’s patriots fought to cleanse and restore the nation.
But he wouldn’t be a coward. Today, subtlety had run out of uses. He’d tried that with Tasia, had worked on it for fourteen long goddamned months, only to see her crumble in the face of the Usurper’s hypnotic power.
Plan A had failed. And if Plan B failed today, none of his precautions or insurance policies could save him. He had records of the meeting at which the mission’s parameters and his fee had been arranged. He had photos and credit card records from his trip, and a password-protected recording of the meeting stashed on his computer and in a safe deposit box. He had matchbooks from that truck stop in Hoback, Wyoming. But none of that could protect him now. He’d taken half his fee up front. He’d put the plan into motion. Keyes and Ivory were involved. And, above all, he knew everything. Fail, and he’d be silenced for good. Mercs, a hit man, government agents acting under official orders—somebody would kill him.
Through rising anxiety, Chennault maintained the cheery buffoon mask and walked toward Sacramento Street. An open-air, double-decker tour bus gargled past. The driver was droning an amplified travelogue to a mob of Chinese tourists. That was soon going to stop.
Fourteen months he’d worked with Tasia. When he had been hired for this assignment, he at first thought it would be impossible. The mission parameters were strict: Robert McFarland must exit the White House. He must leave in such a way that he could never return. His legacy must be tainted forever. This must be accomplished by embroiling him in a major scandal involving his ex-wife.
Chennault had not been instructed on how to accomplish these goa
ls. But he had been told that Fawn Tasia McFarland was bipolar with paranoid tendencies, sometimes hypersexual, sometimes suicidal, and in possession of a handgun legally registered to the president. The poetic details had been left up to him, though the phrase “murdersuicide” was mentioned more than once.
So for fourteen months, Chennault had worked on Tasia. And she had been so intense, so eager to listen to him, that he had come to think she was the real thing: a renegade, a Madonna who had lived inside the jackal’s tent and escaped to tell the truth.
Fourteen months. He had convinced her of Big Pharma’s mission to tranquilize the populace on behalf of the Gub, and so she’d quit taking her medication. Once she did, her creativity and huge animal energy had roared to the fore. So too had her paranoia. As in earlier times when her mania was uncontrolled, she was easily convinced that Robert McFarland had destroyed her health and happiness—and had never apologized for it. And then, when she inevitably crashed into depression, Chennault had given Tasia a doctor’s name. Forget about the mood stabilizer—ask him for Prozac. Live with passion and commitment, but not the blues.
Send her into orbit, that had been Chennault’s goal. Agitate her. Agitation was a risk factor for suicide. Turn her into the energizer bunny of mania. In that condition, Tasia had been ready to help bring down the false god that was devouring Washington.
Chennault convinced her that McFarland needed to own up to the terrible choices he had forced her to make during their marriage. Contact him, he told her. Tell him you’re writing an autobiography. He’ll meet with you—he’ll be desperate to know what you’re writing. And when you get him alone, force him to beg forgiveness for leaving you lonely and depressed while he was deployed overseas.
Oh . . . and reserve connecting hotel rooms. That way, Chennault said, he could record everything McFarland admitted to, in crisp stereo sound, through the connecting door.
Tasia had asked: And if he refuses to talk?
You know how to make him speak honestly, Chennault answered. Bring the gun. McFarland won’t possibly balk if you threaten suicide.
