The President's Henchman

by Joseph Flynn

  McGill had the cab circle the block on P Street and drop him off at the far corner. He gave the driver $50. Not for himself, of course, but for his favorite charity.

  He approached his office building from the opposite side of the street. The block was tree-lined, and cars occupied every parking space; he had plenty of cover to duck behind. But there was no one out to spy on him. No other pedestrian walked on either side of the street. No one was peering out a window. The only sounds came from traffic whizzing along nearby Rock Creek Parkway.

  He looked across the street at Dikki’s building. The café table was still, out but the umbrella and chairs had been taken in. He wondered if Dikki was still inside, too. Unable to answer the phone.

  It hadn’t taken him long to guess the source of Dikki’s troubles. He’d figured it out in the cab on the way over. Who would pick a fictional doctor as an alter ego except another doctor? What doctor could he have ticked off lately? Damon Todd. Could Todd come to express his displeasure to McGill at home? Well, look what had happened when an innocent but unexpected cabbie had come calling at the White House.

  So Todd had stopped by his office after hours. The only question was, had he hurt or killed Dikki to get McGill’s attention? Actually, there was another question. Could he have known McGill would come alone? No, he couldn’t. But if he’d been watching McGill’s movements, he would know the level of protection he usually had: one special agent.

  If this guy thought he could take care of McGill and Deke, he had quite some opinion of himself. McGill didn’t share it, though. Any guy who had to drug and hypnotize women to have sex with them had to be the worst kind of coward.

  McGill did a visual sweep of Dikki’s building from the top down. There was no one on the roof that he could see. The windows of McGill Investigations, Inc. were dark. As were the windows of Wentworth & Willoughby, the accounting firm on the second floor. Down on the ground floor, though, a dim glow showed through the plate-glass window at the front of A-Sharp Sound. Max Lucey could be in one of his recording studios working on a project.

  McGill checked again for passersby. He still had that stretch of P Street to himself. He took out his gun and the key to the front door of the building. He crossed the street and slipped the key into the lock. He didn’t have to turn the key; the door was unlocked.

  That wasn’t the way Dikki would have left it. He stepped inside.

  To the right was the stairway, leading to the upper floors. To the left, a short hallway led to Dikki’s office and the rear exit. McGill flicked the safety off his gun and took a quick peek up the staircase. Didn’t see or hear anything.

  Dikki’s small office was on the right of the hallway, tucked under the stairs. Light painted a yellow ribbon at the bottom of his door. The rear exit door was tightly shut. It could be opened with a push from inside, but an alarm would sound. Dikki had shown him once that the alarm was startlingly loud. Maybe that was the thing to do now. Draw some outside attention.

  Of course, if Todd had a gun in Dikki’s ear, and the noise made him jump …

  Maybe Dikki’s office, itself, was the trap. The burning light was the come-on. Open the door and boom! A gun or a bomb goes off, and suddenly your future is behind you. Only, as far as McGill knew, Todd had no history of using guns or bombs.

  What was more likely for a headshrinker, he’d try to fuck with your head. Leave a light on and hope you’d ignore it. Wouldn’t take the chance of investigating. You’d consider your own safety first. Then, if you survived, you’d learn that you’d blown the opportunity to save someone else’s life; you’d chickened out. Live with that.

  McGill looked around once more, saw no one, and turned the doorknob. He flung the door open and flattened himself against the adjacent wall. No lethal engine was triggered, but the door quickly closed again.

  It had hit something and bounced back with a bang.

  But the noise drew no reaction. No voice called out. No footsteps approached. McGill tried the door to Dikki’s office again. Gave it an easy push this time. Halfway through its arc, the door stopped with a soft thump.

  McGill took a quick peek and saw Dikki lying on the floor in front of his desk.

  Welborn and Leo saw the silhouette on the shade in a second-floor window of the Cowan house. A nude woman. Arlene Cowan. Doing her best in a bad situation. Really working for that new house in Tennessee.

  The two men watched from Leo’s Chevy, parked nose out, in the driveway across the street. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for Welborn and Leo to offer bawdy comments, but neither of them did. They’d both been raised better than that.

  Arlene Cowan had reached her husband at the number he’d given her. She’d persuaded him that they had to talk. She had information he needed, but no way was she going to tell him over the phone. Who knew who might be listening in? Person to person, wife to husband, nobody could make them reveal a word of what they said.

  After Arlene had clicked off, she’d turned to Welborn with tears in her eyes.

  “I actually loved Dex once upon a time. Now, I feel like such a rat.”

  “Think of your new life,” Welborn told her. “Your job, your house, your horse.”

  “Accentuate the positive.” She laughed, but it was a humorless sound.

  It had been her idea to do the peep show. Make sure she got Dex into the house. And if Welborn didn’t mind, she’d throw him one last good one as it would likely be the last he’d ever have. The law could have him after that.

  Welborn didn’t like the idea; it conjured images of a hostage situation.

  But Arlene looked so forlorn … and the idea of his coming between a man’s last conjugal act with his wife was embarrassing … and he thought he could make it work, and …

  Welborn was young. It was his first case.

  He waited across the street in the car with Leo. For all he knew, a married man could smell another male in his house. If he stayed inside, he was more likely to cause trouble than prevent it. Besides, if Arlene did throw Dex Cowan a good one, he didn’t want to be close enough to hear the bedsprings creak.

  Intruding on Welborn’s thoughts, Leo said, “Lights coming.”

  Welborn turned his head and saw the approaching car. “It’s a Viper.”

  The car slowed. Captain Dexter Cowan was behind the wheel. He turned the wheels to head into his driveway and … stopped. Seeing Arlene’s figure up there could have that effect on a man, Welborn reasoned. Cowan spent several seconds taking in the view. Maybe anticipating the pleasure that would soon be his.

  “Enjoy it while you can, buddy,” Welborn muttered.

  But sex with the missus wasn’t what the Navy man had in mind. He suddenly cut his wheels back toward the street, and the Viper took off with a roar. A heartbeat later, Leo had the Chevy rocketing after it.

  Welborn had flown fighter jets. Whatever top end either the Viper or the Chevy could manage, it would amount to little more than stall speed for an F-22. Then again, speed was relative, a matter of context. At thirty thousand feet, supercruising at Mach 1.5 could get to feel more like cruising than super. It was only when you flew your bird down on the deck and saw how fast that distant mountain range was coming upon you that you really got to appreciate how fast you were moving.

  At street level, being pressed back into his seat by the car’s acceleration, Welborn felt like Leo had the Chevy about to break the sound barrier. Stationary objects — houses, trees, light poles — became part of a blurred continuum at the corners of his eyes. The only object that remained in sharp focus lay directly ahead: the navy blue Viper.

  Welborn was very glad most of the good people of Falls Church were off that particular thoroughfare just then. God help anyone who got in the way.

  “You’ll stop for school buses, right?” Welborn asked.

  Leo grinned. “Them and people with white canes. But you got a point.”

  He tapped a button on the steering wheel. The special effects show began i
mmediately. High-intensity lights flashed from the front grille. A howler screamed. Even the engine’s growl seemed louder. Seismographs would be picking up their approach.

  Welborn only hoped that any other drivers on the road would be equally aware.

  Especially after Dex Cowan busted right through a red light. Flew through the intersection and onto the Leesburg Pike entrance ramp to I-66 eastbound. Leo had the Chevy no more than ten feet behind. By great good fortune neither vehicle had threatened any legitimately proceeding cross traffic. But rolling along the highway, approaching the entry point of the on-ramp, was a fifty-three-foot tractor-trailer hauling groceries for the Giant supermarket chain.

  Both speeding drivers downshifted. Welborn was thrown forward and caught by his three-point safety belt. He felt it dig hard into his shoulder, chest, and waist. The sensation was so hauntingly familiar it would have flashed him back to the night his friends had died had he not been so focused on his own imminent mortality. The Giant truck filled his entire field of vision; it looked like both the Viper and the Chevy would become decals on the side of the trailer. He closed his eyes, not daring to hope he’d ever open them again.

  But the crash never came. There wasn’t even a jolt. Only a sideways drifting sensation. Welborn wondered if the passage from life to afterlife could be so gentle. He opened his eyes. The truck that had been right in front him was now … where the hell was it? He looked at the right-hand side-view mirror. There it was. The semi had already receded to the point of being tiny. Looking ahead, he saw that Cowan, too, had escaped unscratched.

  “Boy’s a fair driver for an amateur,” Leo allowed.

  The Viper and the Chevy were, appropriately, in the fast lane. Traffic on the highway was light at the moment. The cars in the other two lanes might have been stopped to fix flat tires for how quickly they were left behind. Both the Viper and the Chevy weaved around a Porsche that was clogging up the fast lane, doing no more than 95 mph.

  Leo made it look effortless. He even started to hum.

  Which made Welborn think to ask, “You have a radio? I’ll call for help.”

  “Look out your window,” Leo said.

  Welborn did, at first seeing only the blur of highway signs. Then he looked up and saw a police helicopter. It was struggling to keep pace.

  “We’re outrunning an aircraft,” Welborn said.

  Leo smiled. “Yeah. Who says Detroit can’t make a great car?”

  “Those cops didn’t just happen along, did they?”

  “Uh-uh. When I hit the let’s-boogie button — the lights and screamer — it started broadcasting an emergency signal. Every police unit in a sixty-mile radius is homing in on us. For all they know the president’s husband could be along for the ride.”

  “That police escort would be comforting … if they can keep up.”

  “They probably have a few fixed-wing planes that can. Important thing, though, they’ll be radioing ahead, clearing the roads for us.”

  “That is good,” Welborn agreed.

  “But the rest is up to us. Cops tried to set up a roadblock on a vehicle pushing 160 miles per hour, the debris field would cover three counties.”

  “So your suggestion would be?”

  Leo might have been a commuter driving to work with a cup of coffee in one hand for all the concern he showed. “If I had just a bit more confidence in that boy up there, I’d pull alongside and swap a little paint with him. Maybe throw a spark or two. Take the starch out of him.”

  “Let’s not do that,” Welborn said.

  Leo shot him a look. “You really used to fly jets?”

  “Yeah. Give me a minute or two to adapt here, will you? There weren’t any bridge abutments where I worked.”

  “Okay, maybe you’ve got a point. We’ll just squat on him then.”

  Leo narrowed the gap between the Viper and the Chevy. There wasn’t room for a stray thought between the two cars. Welborn was able to read Cowan’s speedometer.

  “The point of tailgating is?” he asked.

  “It’s my comfort zone,” Leo said, “but I doubt it’s his.”

  Or mine, Welborn thought. “You don’t want him comfortable?”

  “I want him holding on for dear life and running out of gas real soon. Him going dry is our best play now.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” Welborn said.

  “What?”

  Cowan goosed the Viper, swerved right, and shot into the lanes for I-495, the Washington Beltway. He gained maybe five feet on Leo for maybe two seconds. Once again, the Chevy drew close enough for Welborn to see Cowan’s instrument cluster.

  “I was going to say he wasn’t running flat out, but he is now.”

  Leo was having a grand time. “I’m beginning to like that ol’ boy.”

  SAC Celsus Crogher was right where he belonged, guarding the president of the United States at Camp David, when he got the news.

  “Holmes is out.”

  The bulletin came from Winston Strawn, the officer in charge of the uniformed detail at the northwest gate of the White House.

  “What do you mean out?” Crogher demanded.

  “He left the building in a cab.”

  “A cab?” Crogher would have found it equally credible to hear McGill had been taken away in a flying saucer. “Who’s with him?”

  “Nobody. Just the cabbie.”

  “And you let him go?”

  “He’s free, white, and over twenty-one.”

  Strawn, being African-American and about to retire after thirty years of flawless service, felt free to be politically incorrect and crack wise to his boss.

  “Besides,” he said, “who’s going to tell the president’s henchman no?”

  Everyone in the Secret Service knew that Crogher hadn’t been able to do it.

  Goddamn that James J. McGill, Crogher thought. The SAC really wanted to quit. But that bastard McGill had been right. He’d never forgive himself if he left and something bad happened to Holly G. Like everyone else who spent any time with her, except her demented political enemies, Crogher had fallen in love with the president. Platonically, of course.

  “Did you hear Holmes’s destination?” he asked.

  “Negative.”

  “But you got the cab’s number.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Find that cabbie immediately. I’ll be touching down in thirty minutes.”

  McGill stepped out the front door of his P Street building. He carried Dikki Missirian’s unconscious form. He laid the man down on the welcome mat outside of A-Sharp Sound. Dikki was more than heavy enough to activate the pressure plate under the mat. The light at the back of the business, near the recording studios, still glowed. Max Lucey would come out and find Dikki.

  He’d see the Post-It note on the landlord’s chest: Call 911. I’ll be up in my office. Jim McGill.

  He’d have called for an ambulance and the Metro police if the phone in Dikki’s office hadn’t been disabled. As for Dikki himself, McGill hadn’t been able to rouse him, but his pulse was steady, and he showed no signs of physical distress. He had to be drugged.

  Ketamine hydrochloride would be McGill’s bet.

  He went back into the building. The prudent thing to do, of course, was wait for the Metro cops to come. Let them make the pinch. Lead Damon Todd away in handcuffs. Except he didn’t know the response time for the local PD. Should be pretty good for a gilded area like Georgetown, but if the cops already had their hands full on a Friday night with other calls, it could be an hour or more. Todd might slip away.

  McGill wasn’t going to let that to happen.

  He drew his gun and started to climb the stairs. Not a single one creaked. The silence was perfect for having second thoughts. Even if the Metro cops were busy, the Secret Service would come on the run. He arrived at the second-floor offices of Wentworth & Willoughby. No light came through the frosted-glass panel in the top half of W&W’s door. He tried the door. Locked.

&nbs
p; Didn’t necessarily mean that Todd wasn’t inside. Dikki had keys to every door in the building; he kept them in his office. Where Todd had waylaid the landlord. So you had to figure the psycho-shrink had access to —

  Jesus!

  It could be Todd, not Max Lucey, who was inside A-Sharp Sound, and he’d left Dikki down there on the welcome mat with a note to call 911. Saying where he could be found, too.

  Not a good time to get sloppy, he told himself.

  Question was which way did he go: up or down.

  Up, he decided. He was the reason Todd was in the building. He was the one who’d been lured there that night. That spoke of a desire for a confrontation. A showdown. Where would a lunatic like Todd most want that to happen? McGill’s personal space, of course.

  McGill also found the setting apt.

  He ascended to the third floor. The landing where lobbyists had once waited to court his favor looked as innocent as at any other time he’d seen it. The door to his suite from the hallway was on the left; the door to the stairs leading to the roof was straight ahead. Both were tightly closed. No light bled through either doorframe.

  McGill glanced over his shoulder. No one was climbing the stairs behind him.

  He tried both doors; they were locked. He used his left hand to turn the key in the door bearing his name on frosted glass. He pushed it open a couple of inches and waited. If Max Lucey was the one who found Dikki out front, it shouldn’t be too long before he heard the sound of an ambulance. On the other hand, if it was Todd downstairs, waiting McGill out, Dikki would be easy pickings for the first street thief to happen by.

  McGill couldn’t just stay where he was and mark time.

  He kicked the door to his office open and burst through the entryway like a sprinter coming out of the blocks. He cut left around the reception desk, skidded to a neat stop, and flicked a light switch with his gun hand. But just as if Thomas Edison had never been born, the lights stayed off.

  Behind him, McGill heard a soft laugh mock his efforts.

  He whirled, and, in the light from the hallway, he saw a cylindrical object heading straight at him. Not high where he could duck or low where he could jump. But smack-dab in the middle. A rib crusher. A gut buster. A fight ender.