Connolly stood with Wellesley Jr., just off the dais, taking in the speech, feeling the roars of the crowd of nearly 18,000, an exceptional turnout. The campaign manager felt the buzzing of the phone in his left front pocket, the burner phone for the Bishop. “Our friend is texting.”
“The Bishop?” Wellesley Jr. asked quietly, looking straight ahead.
Connolly nodded and the two of them slipped away from the dais and down a tunnel that led back to the bowels of the arena and to a locker room that was an anteroom for the campaign. The burner phone revealed a text with a message: “Check e-mail. Look at pictures. Do you know woman?”
“Woman?” Wellesley Jr. asked.
“I think he’s asking about the woman working with the St. Paul Detective McRyan. It’s a new development. Let me get out my personal tablet.” Connolly took his tablet out of his computer bag, opened up the e-mail from the anonymous account and opened the first picture.
“Dara frickin’ Wire,” Wellesley Jr. said bitterly.
“You know her?”
“FBI. Or she was. She’s …”
Connolly saw the look of anger over take Wellesley Jr.’s face. “She’s the one who … you know … like … rearranged your face.”
“That’s her,” Wellesley Jr. growled. “You tell our friend that if he can take that bitch out I’ll get him any vote he’ll ever need.”
“I’ll call the Bishop.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“There was no time for the layer cake.”
The man sipped his coffee and admired the view for another minute, considering the chaos he’d set in motion in locations not as serene as the one he now overlooked. The isolated cabin was idyllic, of course, he would have nothing less. It contained just the right touch of rustic furnishings along with all the modern conveniences the Bishop was accustomed to and needed for his business. The view as he sat at a pine table on the porch looking high out over the broad valley down to the York River was spectacular to say the least. The pallet of orange, yellow, brown and red of the autumn leaves stretched for miles, accented by the clear blue sky.
The Bishop sat at the table looking at his laptop screen, playing chess against the computer. For a man who carried the nickname “the Bishop,” he had played little chess in his life until very recently. In his life there was little time for games or hobbies. When he was a child he enjoyed playing with dominos. Not playing the game against an opponent, but rather setting them up in complex and long formations and then once complete, just ticking one domino down and making the rest fall. It served as a metaphor for his life, setting up and making the dominos fall. Running his business was his hobby, his obsession, his time playing in the sandbox. However, now that he’d started playing chess he was obsessed with it and how it mirrored his life, the moves he made and the pieces he moved around to make events occur as he wished. He’d come to the conclusion whether he was buying stock through numerous shell companies for a hostile takeover of a corporation, uncovering compromising information on an energy minister in Russia in return for drilling rights or using his proxies in Syria to continue to feed the violence and civil strife, the Bishop realized that all of life was a chess game, one move begetting another. He had the innate ability to see two or three moves ahead and he could set the trap. Often times he enjoyed the journey every bit as much as the ultimate destination.
This time, however, he was not enjoying the journey to the ultimate destination. The election had to be won, but there were loose ends imperiling the end game. The former was set to be won if the latter was handled.
The Bishop rarely involved himself so thoroughly in politics. There were candidates that he favored to which he donated vast sums of money, far beyond what was allowed by previous state and federal campaign financing laws, but always in his preferred method, indirectly, through various organizations, in manners that were untraceable. But this time around, for the presidency, the election was paramount to achieving his ultimate goal and to protecting his interests.
Governor James Thomson was a man who believed in everything the Bishop didn’t. Whether it was the environment, for which Thomson wanted to take action on global warming and move away from fossil fuels, to his promises to break up the big banks, everything Thomson proposed and wished to enact would hit at everything the Bishop had spent years building and profiting from. It was his goal to be the richest man in the world. A Thomson presidency would make his goals much more difficult if not impossible to attain.
Therefore, the election had to be won.
Nobody beyond a few people knew that he was involved and the loose ends were being tied up one by one and how it was being done didn’t bother him. The Bishop was a ruthless man and believed you could only succeed to the level he aspired by being so. You did not attain the wealth and power he had by being nice, by playing by the rules. You got to where the Bishop was by doing whatever it took to get and stay there. So Martin, Checketts, Stroudt, Montgomery and McCormick were done and gone and the Bishop wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. He didn’t have anything personal against them. It was just business.
And now the radio playing quietly to his right gave him an extremely relieving piece of news—Foche was dead.
The Bishop exhaled. Foche served him well for the past ten years and he would be missed, not only by the Bishop but by Kristoff as well. But Foche was also one less loose end to worry about. One less awkward situation to deal with, because it would have had to have been dealt with.
The question now circulating through his mind was whether such steps would be needed with regard to the St. Paul detective and his lady friend. He’d read the background on McRyan. He was a very able cop and his file screamed relentless. The man would not stop investigating as long as there was something to go on.
McRyan was a threat and he now had a partner who was equally troubling.
Dara Wire.
Courtesy of Wellesley Jr., he now had the identity of the woman who likely shot Foche and was involved in the fireworks outside of McRyan’s Pub.
Dara Wire was thirty-four years old and retired from the FBI, an early retirement not of her choice. Up until four years ago, she’d been a rising star in the bureau, working organized crime, having first worked undercover and by the time she was thirty, beginning to recruit and serve as the main contact for undercover operatives. She was becoming a top-notch investigator with an extremely bright future in the bureau.
The Bishop spent a moment looking at her picture.
Wire wasn’t necessarily pretty but she was a strikingly attractive woman, a brunette with soft green eyes and an alluring smile. Yet, he could see how she would have been effective undercover working the mob. This was especially true when he evaluated the photo of her in an extremely low-cut body hugging black dress cut at mid-thigh and wearing stiletto heels. She could do the gangster’s moll look, big hair, large breasts and copious makeup for just the right amount of trashiness. The goombas probably fell all over themselves for her.
Four years ago, Wire was working an informant in the Giordano crime family, which was operating in northern New Jersey and was proving particularly troublesome on several real estate projects on the Hudson Riverfront looking towards Manhattan. Wire’s informant was in deep with the family and the RICO case was building to take a big chunk of the infrastructure of the Giordano’s down. The investigation, and its advanced stages, apparently got back to Donald Wellesley Jr. who let it slip at a DC cocktail party, a party that included a delegation of politicians from New Jersey, that the bureau had an informant feeding information on the Giordano’s. Word from the party leaked back to the Giordano’s and after conducting their own form of internal family investigation, Wire’s informant was found floating in the Hudson, so badly beaten he could only be identified by his fingerprints.
With what they had on the Giordano’s, the FBI moved in and in the process of interrogating family members, Wire discovered how the family learned of her informant. The bureau’s h
igher ups, at the time a particularly spineless lot, were not about to touch the son of the vice president. Incensed, Wire took matters into her own hands and found Wellesley Jr. at a Washington DC bar and proceeded to, Giordano style, savagely beat him to a pulp around the face until the Secret Service, hanging idly outside the bar, was able to get inside and take Wire into custody.
At a minimum, Dara Wire was out of the bureau and was looking at far worse trouble. However, she had one ace in the hole and the Bishop smiled. He loved and admired power plays and Wire had the ultimate power player come to her defense—Judge Dixon.
She’d come to his attention while he was still the attorney general due to her impressive undercover work. The Judge intervened on her behalf and threatened to expose the vice president’s son and few knew how to do that like Dixon. The Judge was able to leverage a soft departure from the bureau for Wire. Donald Wellesley Jr., meanwhile, disappeared from view for a number of months to recuperate from his injuries.
With McRyan and Wire on the hunt, the Bishop had reason to worry.
Of course, he’d have much preferred to operate without there ever being even the possibility of any loose ends requiring Kristoff to ply his services in so many places and to such brutal effect. The Bishop often thought of his operations as a layer cake, with layer after layer between himself and what he was trying to accomplish. His involvement was never known or discovered.
However, there were times when you had to move quickly and didn’t have the luxury of setting up the layer cake. When Heath Connolly came to him about his friend Peter Checketts and the trouble he was having in Las Vegas, the Bishop saw the opening and the chance to grab the election out of the jaws of defeat, but they had to move quickly.
“There was no time for the layer cake,” he muttered, sipping his coffee.
There was no layer cake, and then Kentucky went bad.
It seemed like a simple and safe enough meeting, especially with Kristoff solving the Martin problem in Milwaukee at the same time. The meeting was like so many he’d arranged over the years that had gone off without a hitch. And the Kentucky meeting was necessary. Given the money and stakes at risk, he and Connolly needed to be certain their plan would work and needed to see how it would work. But then the meeting was discovered and he’d been tying off loose ends ever since—Stroudt, Montgomery, McCormick and Checketts.
Now the extremely capable McRyan and Wire were investigating.
They were a danger.
The two of them were relentless and would not stop.
They presented him with one last loose thread to clip and the man to solve that problem was coming up his driveway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“You ever see Bullitt?”
The Judge sat on a folding chair in the bowels of Crisler Arena on the campus of the University of Michigan and poured over the electoral map as he listened to Michigan’s governor rev up the crowd for Governor Thomson, who would speak in five minutes. Michigan was largely in the bag, the governor up by eight points, but they wanted to be sure and much of their campaigning, and the media coverage it would garner, would seep into the northern Ohio media markets, which was prime vote territory.
Yet despite the enthusiasm in the arena, the Judge was dour. Something was going on at DataPoint and it was going to have an impact on the election. “Fucking Connolly,” he grumbled, as he stood up and heard the roars of the crowd come through the halls of Crisler Arena on the campus of the University of Michigan.
“You were right, of course,” Sally Kennedy said, standing ten feet back. She’d walked unnoticed into the anteroom a minute earlier and was watching the Judge pore over the map.
“About?”
“Connolly.”
The Judge twirled his cigar in his right hand. “I’ve met many a political operator in my day, Ms. Kennedy. And most of them understood there was a certain honor that came with doing this. They loved their country.”
“But they played by the rules, right?”
The Judge smiled, a kind of wistful smile, an acknowledgment that his views were now very old school, but they were also from a good school. “To quote my good friend, the forty-second president of the United States,” the Judge deadpanned in his best Clinton, “that depends upon what your definition of ‘rules’ is.”
Sally chuckled as did the Judge.
“So rules are relative in politics. You hit your opponent hard where he is weak and you pound away day after day. You might twist your opponent’s words out of context to get political mileage out of it. And if I could, I always liked to keep a surprise or two in my back pocket if I could to use the week before the election. All of that’s fair game,” the Judge said enthusiastically. “Guys like Ol’ Ed Rollins, Steve Schmidt, Jimmy Baker, Mary Matalin, Charlie Black, they were good people to go up against. They were patriots. They were Republicans that I could battle against and they would piss me off, oh my God, would they piss me off. But it was because they were good. I worked on Mondale’s campaign back in 1984, back when you were probably in elementary school.”
“Pre-school, actually,” Kennedy needled.
“Man, I’m getting old,” the Judge answered ruefully. “Well, in 1984, Fritz got his ass kicked. Of course, it’s the height of the Cold War and the president ran that ‘Bear in the Woods’ television spot. Have you seen that?”
“Sure, I saw it on YouTube when someone mentioned it a while back.”
“YouTube,” the Judge snorted and shook his head, acknowledging again how things had indeed changed. “Anyway. I remember calling Ed Rollins who was running the Reagan campaign a week before the election.”
“Before the election?”
“Oh hell yeah. It was over at that point, the only question was whether the Gipper would sweep everything or if we could at least hold onto Minnesota. So I called Ed and we laughed about that ad because it was brilliant. It really was and I had to tell him that. And it was good politics. Ed and his boys kicked our ass, but he did it with honor and integrity. Heath Connolly?” The Judge shook his head. “Connolly has no honor or integrity. I hate Rove. What he did to a good man in John McCain back in 2000 in South Carolina and then Max Cleland down in Georgia in 2002, a Vietnam Vet, a man who lost limbs in that war, engineering a campaign that questioned his patriotism, his commitment to protect this country, was reprehensible. It degraded the politics of our country and simply creates an environment where people like Heath Connolly flourish. He’s Karl Rove on steroids, EPO and HGH all at once. Connolly could give a shit about country.”
“But he wins,” Kennedy answered.
“And in the end I suppose that’s all that matters to lots of people,” the Judge answered. “Just not me. I’ll have to meet my maker someday. When I’m lying on my death bed, I want to know I did right. I don’t want to be like Lee Atwater, begging for forgiveness on my death bed for my sins against my fellow man when I’m dying. I want to go with a clear conscience knowing I did it the right way.”
“Connolly doesn’t have a conscience from what I can see.”
“Or a soul,” the Judge shook his head disgustedly. “He doesn’t care how you win, just win.” Dixon exhaled. “I think how you win matters.”
Sally nodded and looked down at the map and saw the Judge’s chicken scratch math off to the side of the map, with Ohio in Governor Thomson’s column, but Iowa, Wisconsin and Virginia flipped red. The election would end up 271 for the vice president and 267 for Governor Thomson. She’d done the math herself a few times already, running different scenarios on her notepad, assuming something was going on in the three key states.
“Judge?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find the answers. I’ve got faith.”
“In your boy?” Meaning Mac.
She nodded and then gave him a sly smile. “He likes to win too.”
* * *
Saturday afternoon on Water Street in Milwaukee meant it was time for Happy Hour drinks. As 4:00 p.
m. disappeared in the rearview mirror, the bars along the avenue started to fill with partiers dressed in red looking to get tuned up for the football game. The Wisconsin Badgers would be playing the Minnesota Golden Gophers at 6:00 p.m. and the bar was starting to fill with Badger fans for the game; it looked like the Soviet Red Army was invading. In Wisconsin, with the successes of the Green Bay Packers and Wisconsin Badgers football teams, much of the talk in the bar revolved around the bruising Badgers rushing game or the aerial majesty of Aaron Rodgers. It was expected that the weekend would be one of winning. For Mac, sitting in a corner booth at Fitzgibbon’s, it all made his stomach turn.
“Why such a sour look on your face?” Wire asked, sipping at her Miller Lite. They were in Milwaukee so the beer would, of course, have to be a Miller product.
“The Packer and Badger fans,” McRyan answered, gesturing to the crowd. “My poor Golden Gophers, they never seem to be able to get over the hump. They play the Badgers tonight, and while the new coach has them going in the right direction, it could be really ugly here in a few hours. And the Packers? The team is great, fun to watch and I love Aaron Rodgers, he is a stud, and Lambeau Field? I’ve watched two games there and it is way cool. But the Packer fans?” He shook his head. “The worst. Absolutely insufferable.”
“They love their team.”
“Everyone loves their team,” Mac answered. “But only in Wisconsin, only in Wisconsin, do the fans actually delude themselves into thinking they’re part of the team. In Minnesota, we don’t say ‘we’ when talking about the Vikings. We say the Vikes will beat the Bears, the Purple will beat the Packers. In Wisconsin, they don’t say the Pack will beat the Vikes, they say ‘we’ will beat the Vikes. There is no ‘we.’ They are not on the field. The fans are not playing. They’re just fans, just like ones in every other city. It’s ridiculous.”
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