Tori stood up from the couch slowly. “I’m sorry, Ray.”
* * *
—
Never trust anyone. He had lived by those words his entire existence.
Cole slammed Burgess’s Mercedes station wagon into fourth gear as he tore down the country lane. Tori had shown herself worthy time after time, putting herself in the line of fire over and over, even tearing her fingernail off with her teeth. But something told him she was too willing to put herself on the line. No one did the things she had done just for a career, or to impress a parent. He could have been convinced that she was doing it to help his father. Love was a strong motivator, but since they’d left the General’s house yesterday, Tori hadn’t mentioned Jim Egan once. Cole hadn’t told her he’d sent the Helena police to the mountains overlooking Powell with the phony cult suicide story, and she hadn’t asked.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she was as loyal as anyone could be. But the hell with it. If he was wrong, she’d just have to understand. It was exactly the way he had felt as the cleaning woman had tried too hard to get into the Gilchrist screening room. It was better to be safe than sorry.
He glanced over his shoulder at the briefcase on the Mercedes’s backseat. Inside was a million dollars and the Dealey Tape. He had placed the tape inside the briefcase as Burgess distracted Tori on the couch with talk of marketing plans and potential interviews for the television special. He had picked the tape up from where Burgess left it on the cluttered desk—typically neat as a pin—and placed it in the briefcase. The tape Burgess had placed in the safe was a phony. He and Burgess had arranged everything over the phone—including the plan to use Burgess’s Mercedes in case someone had rigged the rental car with a bomb while they were inside—after Cole had met with Seward at the Sofitel. Tori had mentioned Burgess’s name several times, so Cole had contacted him at NBC from a pay phone. It seemed overly cautious to Burgess—he had no reason to believe Tori was anything but honest—but if Cole had doubts, so be it.
Cole had decided to throw in with Burgess immediately. Burgess was a known quantity, a well-paid executive who had been with NBC and in the news business for years, not someone who would likely be influenced by bribes or government intimidation. But Tori was still a wild card. A woman who was trying too hard.
Never trust anyone completely. Cole had remembered hearing Malcolm X say that in an interview once. But in the final analysis you had to trust people for at least short periods of time, sometimes people you didn’t even know. Indeed, sometimes that was easier. Because more often than not, the better you got to know someone, the less you trusted them.
Cole squinted as the morning sun broke through the branches hanging over the country lane as he stared at the house number on the mailbox just up ahead. It was the same number Burgess had written on the pad hidden in the Mercedes’s glove compartment. The house number of a senior executive of General Electric, NBC’s parent company.
Cole slammed on the Mercedes’s brakes to make the turn into the GE executive’s driveway, then put his hand on Nicki’s knee. “Hold on, sweetheart,” Cole said. “We’re almost there.”
Nicki put her hand on top of Cole’s and smiled at him. “I love you, Cole.”
“I love you, too.” Nicki would be the exception to his rule. From now on, he would trust her completely.
* * *
—
“Ray, this is Anthony Bianco,” Tori said, her eyes locked on the floor as she motioned toward the small man on the couch. “He’s—”
“I know who he is,” Burgess interrupted. “He’s Little Tony Bianco, also known as the Chairman. He is the leader of the Bianco crime family, the most powerful Mafia family in this country.” Burgess tried not to let Bianco see that his hands were shaking badly. “A friend of mine at ABC pointed you out in a Manhattan restaurant one day. You were at a small table in the back, hiding from photographers.”
Bianco rose from the couch. “Get the tape from the safe,” he ordered gruffly. He didn’t want to waste time. “Right now.”
Burgess glanced over Bianco’s shoulder. At the study doorway were two very large men, so he was in no position to protest. Burgess moved to the safe, opened it, retrieved the decoy tape he had put inside the safe a few minutes before and handed it to Bianco.
Bianco gave the tape to one of the men in the doorway without taking his eyes from Burgess. “You’ve done a wise thing, Mr. Burgess,” Bianco said in his gruff voice. “We won’t harm you, and NBC will be reimbursed its million dollars.”
“You’re an honorable man,” Burgess said sarcastically.
“I’m a businessman.” The two men at the study door moved aside as Bianco turned away from Burgess. Bianco moved into the hallway, then stopped. In front of him were ten Connecticut state policemen, as well as the man Bianco had left outside Burgess’s house as a lookout. The man was now in handcuffs—and fearful for his life. Bianco had no sympathy for men who failed him.
* * *
—
Bob Maddux, the General Electric executive who lived up the country lane from Burgess, trotted across his wide lawn as the blue Mercedes raced up his driveway. Behind Maddux was an army of local police officers, including his best friend in the world, Frank Shaw, the Greenwich chief of police. Not even an order from the president of the United States would have caused Shaw to ignore Maddux’s request of absolute police protection for Cole Egan and the Dealey Tape. No one was going to get the tape away from Cole at this point. Especially since the state police had just radioed from Ray Burgess’s house to say that they had apprehended Anthony Bianco trying to take possession of the decoy tape.
Maddux opened the door of the Mercedes as Cole pulled the car to a stop. He reached inside and pumped Cole’s hand vigorously. “Congratulations, Mr. Egan. You’re with friends now.”
When the man finished pumping his hand, Cole slumped over the steering wheel. It was over, and now all he wanted to do was sleep. He turned toward Nicki. For several moments they simply stared at each other, then they hugged each other tightly.
29
“You idiot!” Jamison glared at General Zahn from behind the Oval Office desk. “How could you let this happen?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President. I thought Seward and I had everything under control.”
The veins in Jamison’s forehead bulged. Finally he shook his head and closed his eyes. “Leave us, General.”
Zahn rose and exited the office, glad to be out of the line of fire.
Jamison glanced at Walsh. “Tell me everything, Eric.”
Walsh was far away, wondering how quickly he could get to Wall Street and insulate himself from the maelstrom bearing down on Jamison’s administration.
“Eric!” Jamison roared.
Walsh snapped out of his trance. “Sorry, Mr. President.”
“I want details, Eric.”
“Yes, sir.” Walsh could suddenly sense his multimillion-dollar compensation package slipping away. As much as the investment banks now wanted access to his long list of contacts, they would stay away from him if he became embroiled in a scandal. “Somehow Cole Egan eluded us in Minneapolis yesterday and this morning made it to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he showed up at the home of Ray Burgess, a senior executive at NBC News.” Walsh lowered his voice. “Anthony Bianco was waiting at Burgess’s home.”
“How the hell did Bianco find out about Egan going to this guy’s house in Greenwich?” Jamison shouted, suddenly unconcerned about using the Mafia boss’s name in the Oval Office.
“A woman named Victoria Brown was the informant. Ms. Brown is a low-level producer at NBC who somehow befriended Cole Egan. She was with Egan in Wisconsin and Montana,” Walsh explained. “We’re still checking her out. Checking out exactly what her part was in all of this. Anyway, she was the one who tipped Bianco’s people off to the fact that Egan was coming to Burgess’s house in Greenwich. Fr
om what we understand, she dated someone in the Mafia when she was in her early twenties and hasn’t been able to disengage herself from them since.”
“That’s because you can’t disengage yourself from the Mafia once you’ve become involved with them. We know that, don’t we, Eric?”
“I guess we do,” he agreed dismally.
“All right, get a court order, Eric,” Jamison barked. “We’ll confiscate the tape. If that doesn’t work, we’ll take it from NBC citing national security concerns.”
Walsh shook his head. “You’d sound like Richard Nixon firing Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor. You’d sound like a man who’s panicking. And when the wolves see that, they attack. You know that, Mr. President. Besides, NBC has probably made several copies of the tape by now. How would we know we’d gotten them all? The press would be all over us. Someone would tip them off that the pressure to suppress the tape was coming from inside the Oval Office. Then there’d be real trouble.”
“Then what the hell are we going to do?” Jamison raged. “We’ve already got real trouble, for Christ’s sake!”
Walsh folded his hands. “We’ll do nothing,” he said calmly as the thought struck him.
“What?”
“Bianco will be out of jail in a matter of hours, because what the hell can they really charge him with? Trespassing? Breaking and entering? Attempted kidnapping if they get creative, I guess. But nothing really serious. He’ll be back in his Brooklyn compound this afternoon.” Walsh’s mind was working quickly now. “And we’ll let NBC have their fun. We’ll let them play the tape. The downside is that the American people completely lose faith in their government. They see they’ve been lied to for thirty-five years, but the hell with it. Most of them already believe that anyway. And we’re talking about our personal survival here, so fuck the people.” Walsh flicked a piece of lint off of his suit pants. “The other major problem is Anthony Bianco and our link to organized crime. If he really gets a bug up his ass, he could do us some damage.”
Jamison shuddered. Bianco could explain the strange accident that had befallen his competitor in the North Carolina gubernatorial race nine years earlier. And that would be just for starters. There were many other crimes Bianco could convict him of. “He could implicate me in a murder plot.”
“But what’s Bianco’s incentive to do that?” Walsh asked. “He screws himself in the process. If he admits he murdered someone to win you the governorship of North Carolina, he’s going to go to jail for a long time. If he does nothing and the tape is aired, he’s going to come under a lot of heat as the Congressional hearings get cranked up and everyone on the Hill starts grandstanding. As he so rightly believes, many people will focus on the Mafia as the guilty party. But I think ultimately he’ll opt to just take the heat of the Congressional hearings and the FBI. It’s certainly better than spending the rest of his life in prison.”
Jamison nodded. It made sense. “But there are a few others outside of Bianco’s circle who could link me to the Mafia as well,” he said ominously.
“That’s true,” Walsh agreed hesitantly.
For several moments they stared at each other, each fully aware of what the other man was thinking.
30
It had only been a week since Cole’s two-thousand-mile sprint across the country from Powell, Montana, to Ray Burgess’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, but already the bodies were turning up everywhere.
General Avery Zahn was discovered in a motel room naked, with a bullet through his brain. No one had been arrested for the murder—and no one ever would be.
Eric Walsh was found burned beyond recognition after a violent accident on I-95 south of Washington. It took four days for the coroner to receive the dental records so that Walsh’s body could be identified.
Commander John Magee was discovered floating facedown in the Potomac River, his death officially ruled an accidental drowning despite the fact that there was no water found in his lungs.
And William Seward was discovered sprawled on the couch in the study of his isolated Virginia cabin, his death officially ruled a suicide even though the two men who had killed him had also sliced off the index finger of his left hand and thrown it in a Dumpster on their way back to New York.
They were seemingly unrelated deaths. But all of the victims were killed by members of the Bianco crime family at the direction of Anthony Bianco and the president of the United States.
President Jamison sat alone in the Oval Office staring out the window. Zahn had sarcastically noted the irony in his feeble attempt at personality. How accurate and prophetic, Jamison thought to himself. Bodies were turning up all over the place, just as they had after Kennedy’s death.
Jamison put his head back, closed his eyes and took a large swallow of scotch from the glass in his hand. All links between the Bianco crime family and the Oval Office had now been cut. Only he and Anthony Bianco knew what had happened. Bianco had made the decision to remain quiet, just as Eric Walsh had predicted. And now Walsh and the others were permanently quiet.
* * *
—
Cole met Tori in Grand Central Station at the height of rush hour. She had assured him when she called him that there was nothing to worry about, but of course that was what she would say.
“Hello, Cole,” she said as they met in the middle of the main floor. Commuters rushed by them on all sides, headed toward trains.
“Hello,” he said icily.
“I know you’re angry with me.”
“It all worked out.” Cole kept glancing around, searching for any sign of enemies. He wanted to keep this meeting short.
She saw his discomfort. “I told you over the phone, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“And I should trust you?”
“You don’t trust anyone, so I wouldn’t expect that.”
“Mmm.” There were plainclothes policemen in the station to protect him, but he still felt vulnerable. The police had urged him not to come, but for some reason he was willing to take the risk to see her one last time.
“I came with a message,” Tori said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“You’re safe.”
Cole gazed at her. “What?”
“You don’t have to worry about being killed. Anthony Bianco has no interest in stirring up any more trouble. He realizes that if something were to happen to you, he and his people would come under even greater scrutiny. Anthony is a businessman above all else, and he realizes your demise would not be good for business.”
Cole raised one eyebrow. “You and Mr. Bianco are on a first-name basis?”
“We have been for a long time. He’s not the monster you think he is.”
“I think you need to take a reality pill.”
“There’s something else,” Tori said, ignoring Cole’s comment. She knew she would never be able to convince Cole that Bianco had any redeeming qualities, so there was no point dwelling on the issue. “Your debt at the Blue Moon has been erased.”
Despite his effort not to, Cole grinned. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“So the Blue Moon was all part of what happened? All connected to the Dealey Tape?”
Tori shook her head. “No, completely unrelated, but Anthony found out about it. He finds out about everything. He’s personally picking up your tab as a show of good faith. In return, he asks that you not appear on the NBC special the night the network broadcasts the tape.”
“I wasn’t planning to anyway,” Cole answered quickly. “And you can tell your benefactor that I will be repaying the debt at the Blue Moon myself.”
“Whatever.”
“Fine.” Cole turned to go, then hesitated. “How long have you been involved with those people?”
“A long time,” she said solemnly.
“But why?”
“It seemed exciting when I was young, and it was the last thing my mother wanted me to do.”
“But you must have realized”—he paused—“I mean, at some point, why didn’t you get away from them?”
She smiled sadly. “You don’t do that, Cole. They arranged for several women to ‘run into’ your father over the years. I was one of them and ultimately the one your father wanted. I couldn’t walk away from that situation. They would have killed me.”
“So they were following my father all that time?” Cole asked dubiously.
“Yes. I told you that the day we met. A lot of people were.”
“That’s incredible.” He glanced up at the domed ceiling. “Well, I’ve got to go.”
She nodded. She wanted him to stay a little longer, but there was nothing else to say. “Goodbye, Cole.”
“Goodbye.” He turned and disappeared into the crowd.
She gazed after him for several moments, then retraced her steps to the black limousine waiting on Forty-second Street in front of Grand Central. Once inside the vehicle she moved across the bench seat until she was beside Anthony Bianco. He smiled at her for a moment, then kissed her on both cheeks.
31
Barry Nelson sorted through the stack of envelopes on his desk, found the appropriate one and tossed it at Cole, who sat on the other side of the desk.
Cole ripped the envelope open and pulled out the Gilchrist & Company check. It was made out for eight hundred thousand dollars, which was the after-tax proceeds of his one-and-a-half-million-dollar bonus. “Good Friday was good this year,” Cole noted calmly. At Gilchrist, Good Friday was bonus day, which was the second Friday of January, not the Friday before Easter.
The Legacy Page 31
