by Ridge King
“What do you want to do with it, sir?”
“I don’t want Camilo to be stuck with it.”
“No, sir.”
“What about that safe room below my house?”
“Nobody ever goes there, and it does have four large rooms.”
“Yeah. You change the canned food every couple of years, right?”
“Yes, sir, and make sure the batteries and water supplies haven’t expired.”
“Why don’t we put it there?”
“That would work.”
“Tell Camilo that we’ll make one trip a week up in one my boats so the Secret Service won’t stop it for anything.”
“And we can off-load the bundles quietly, a few at a time.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see to it, sir.”
“OK.”
“Sir?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you plan to do with the money, if I may ask?”
“Oh, let’s see. $60 or $65 million? I don’t know. I thought the first thing I’d do—after we pay Camilo and his people handsomely—is give you a raise.”
Gargrave smiled.
“Thank you, sir.”
“And pay all your expenses the next time you go back to London. Now you can stay at Claridge’s or the Connaught.”
“Thank you again, sir.”
“Otherwise, I think we’ll just sit on it till the right thing comes along that needs that kind of money.”
Jack turned and looked at Babe in the rear cabin. The 206L-4 was a large version of the regular Bell model, and with two wide seats facing each other, the rear cabin could carry more people. He caught Babe’s eye and waved at her. She yelled something but he couldn’t hear a word, even if a thick sheet of glass had not separated the cabins. Rafael and the girls were having a great time.
He turned back and looked out his own window as Gargrave brought the chopper over Biscayne Bay. Downtown Miami’s dramatic skyline was to his right. Dead ahead lay St. Clair Island and the massive Beaux-Arts edifice of Flagler Hall, built in 1902 by Henry Flagler.
Jack saw a couple of ground crew come into sight as they approached one of three helipads off to the side of Flagler Hall. A couple of servants came from the house to assist with their luggage.
Gargrave brought the Bell 206L-4 down gently, landing it like a feather. Jack thought that Gargrave’s training in the Black Group, the unit specializing in helicopter assault Special Ops in M Squadron, part of the British Special Boat Service, was in evidence every day he worked for Jack. He’d met Gargrave when they in the service on a joint operation, back when Jack was on SEAL Team 9, the team the Navy never acknowledged even existed.
As the noise from the rotor died down, Jack crawled out and opened the rear door to help Antonia out, followed by Babe. Rafael came out last. Babe and Antonia were laughing hysterically. Rafael merely smiled sheepishly.
“Clue me in. What’s so funny?” said Jack.
“Hey, Jack—we’ve just been talking,” said Antonia.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Babe.
Rafael held up his hands in a defensive gesture.
“Leave me out of this,” was all he said.
“Antonia thinks it would be cool if we did a double wedding,” said Babe.
Jack burst out laughing. Even the ever-reserved Gargrave cracked a grin.
“We’d have to make it a double wedding and a funeral.”
“What?” said Antonia.
“To bury your sister Raven, ’cause she’d have a heart attack and die!”
Chapter 3
DO NOTHING?
Frederick Thurston, the senior senator from Michigan and Democratic Presidential candidate, didn’t know what to do in light of Eric Stathis’s revelation about the Keystone File the night before at Patricia Vaughan’s party. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to call a news conference and shout the undercover operation’s existence to the entire world, exposing President Norwalk and his slimy minions like Slanetti. Though he was convinced the world would wholeheartedly support him when it found out about such a thing, there were disadvantages with that approach.
He met first thing in the morning with campaign manager and best friend Jesse Epstein and Lamar LeGrand Perryman in the speaker’s office to discuss the situation. Epstein was the only person he told about Keystone. Both men, however, were hesitant about doing anything.
Thurston mentioned a straightforward news conference.
“I’m not sure it might not be the worst thing we could do,” said Epstein, Perryman silently thanking the man.
“I agree, Senator,” said Perryman. “The danger members face who have been approached is exposure. If you cause that exposure where Slanetti has only threatened it, you might do yourself more harm than good.”
“We’ve got to do something!” shouted Thurston, alarming the others with his sudden and passionate outburst. (This was the man who wanted to lead the country?)
“If you made such an announcement, and you’d have to do it in very specific terms, naming names of individual congressmen, I’d deny I’d ever been approached if I was one of the congressmen involved,” said Epstein.
“The only way they might figure on saving themselves,” added Perryman, “is by branding you a liar. This would give them better public reasoning for supporting St. Clair. I don’t see how you can win if you do that.”
Thurston bit his lower lip.
“Then what do you suggest, either of you?”
Epstein and Perryman glanced at each other. Neither knew what to say.
“We might approach them on the sly,” suggested Epstein.
“We don’t know who’s on their list,” said Thurston, getting up and pacing like a caged tiger the century-old carpet in the speaker’s lavish office in the Capitol Building. “Stathis only remembers seeing files on Delamar and Fulton. Delamar didn’t come to the party last night, but John Fulton came by and told me he still thought I was certain to win. He said his support hasn’t wavered a bit.”
Perryman, traitor that he was to his fellow Democrats, knew that Fulton hadn’t been approached yet. He was one of the last men on Slanetti’s list, and he was a formidable man at the very least.
“You can start with the ones who’ve switched over in our own caucus. It’s pretty obvious which ones were approached,” said Epstein. “There’s Delamar, Moldow, Berman and some others.”
“I might do that,” nodded Thurston, still extremely perplexed.
“But you’ll have to be mighty, mighty careful what you say,” chimed in Perryman seriously, his slow Virginia drawl much in evidence. “If you let them think you know what Slanetti knows, you might never get them.”
“That’s true,” agreed Thurston.
“And I’ll do what I can from over here,” said Perryman, lying through his teeth.
“Since you know the score, Lamar, that ought to help a lot,” said Thurston.
“Who else should know this thing?” Epstein asked both of them. This had been on all their minds. On Perryman’s mind had been the worry how to get them not to tell anybody that they knew anything at all about the Keystone File.
“I wouldn’t tell Niles, Senator, if you ask my opinion honestly,” he said.
Thurston nodded.
“Niles Overton would spread it around. People could read it on his face,” he observed. “He couldn’t keep something this big secret for long.”
“If you can’t tell Overton, your own majority leader, who the hell can you tell?” asked Epstein.
It was a question Perryman had been waiting to answer.
“In my sober opinion, gentlemen—no one.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to go along with Lamar right now. Don’t you think so, Jesse?” he asked, looking at the New Yorker whose opinion he relied on most throughout the campaign besides his wife Peggy.
He was slow to answer, but sat in his seat opposite Perryman rubbing his leg, not sure what to say.
/> “I guess so,” he said finally, not wanting to, but saying it anyway.
“OK, then,” said Thurston.
Perryman let slip a little sigh of relief.
Disaster averted, he thought.
“We have to go to that meeting with Dumaine now,” said Epstein.
They were due to meet with Senator Bill Dumaine of Massachusetts; a strategy session that had been planned for a week. Dumaine had mounted an aggressive campaign for the Democratic nomination, and, when he fell short, declined Thurston’s offer for the vice presidential slot, leaving it to Thurston to find someone else. But Thurston had had to absorb the snub to get Dumaine to campaign for him. Everyone knew that Dumaine would make a move to become leader of the Democratic Party the minute Thurston lost the election. Both sides were putting on a good face during this difficult period between the deadlocked election and January.
“Yeah. For now, we have to keep Dumaine on our side,” said Thurston.
“For now,” said Perryman.
“Let’s go,” said Epstein.
The minute they left his office, Perryman picked up the phone.
“Put me through to the President.”
* * *
Vlad drove his Toyota Land Cruiser with heavily tinted windows into the underground garage of Derek’s office building in downtown Miami. As planned, Derek was waiting for him by the garage manager’s office. He pulled up and Derek opened the door.
“New car? I like it.”
“I don’t use it very often. I wanted to drive something our mysterious friend won’t be looking for. Get in the back seat and lie down.”
Derek rolled his eyes.
“You really think this cloak and dagger stuff is necessary?”
He complied, however, got in the rear, and lowered his head onto the back seat.
“I do. They think you’re at work.”
They left the garage and a couple of blocks from the office, Kucherov pulled over.
“Get up front now.”
Derek got into the front seat and gave directions. A few minutes later they were parked across the street from Enriqueta’s on Northeast Second Avenue and 29th Street.
“That’s it. Where we meet. Under that little cluster of palm trees.”
“It’s a depressing little dump,” Kucherov said dismissively.
“What can I say? The Cubans love it.”
“You talk out in the open, under those trees?” asked Kucherov
“Sure. Who can hear us out there?”
“I don’t know how, but somebody heard something somehow,” said Kucherov.
“OK. Let me work out a plan,” said Derek. “We will meet the Oyebanjos here and confirm everything. When the Oyebanjos leave the meeting, we will stay behind and talk, maybe you, me, Howard. We will set something up and see if they bite. If they do, we know someone is telling them something or they are getting information somehow.”
“OK.”
Kucherov drove Derek back to his office, making sure he was below the window level when they entered the garage.
“They’ll never know you left.”
* * *
Frederick Thurston was actually morbid. He cancelled all his appointments for a couple of days so he could think. After dinner with Peggy, he sat alone in his study thinking, a half-finished bottle of Black Label before him on his desk.
His meeting that afternoon with the cocksure Dumaine hadn’t helped his mood. For all his posturing, Thurston could tell Dumaine was praying to God that Thurston lost the election to St. Clair. Praying to God. That would give Dumaine a fresh shot at the Presidency in four years. And Thurston would be out of national politics.
Thurston was sick with indecision, which was unusual for the ordinarily quick-speaking senator, usually fast to take a stand before others did. His orderly mind was boggled, dampened, strained with the impact Keystone had made on him, and he wasn’t at all sure what to do to slow or stop Slanetti’s progress.
He saw his vision of the future fade before him as a melancholy cloud descended over him. He felt the stench of this deep morbidity earlier in the day coming up on him, rising in him as some great channel fills suddenly with water when the tide comes in, so he cancelled his engagements to lick his wounds alone.
He was furious with himself for his over-confidence and embarrassed at the swiftness with which he selected his Cabinet and higher agency officials, so sure was he that he was the next President in all but name.
Before his first briefing at the White House, when his mind had been filled with the seemingly limitless possibilities ahead, he searched his mind for every trick he could imagine St. Clair’s people pulling out of Washington’s often dirty hat, but he couldn’t think of a single item strong enough to derail his onward march to victory. The loss of Delamar at first and the others later hadn’t bothered him. Their states weren’t ones he was counting on in the final floor struggle in the House.
His stomach was a knot of anguish because he knew nothing of the details of Slanetti’s plan. There could be silent conversions he was keeping for the finale. The announced switches might be ploys. He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t know how to approach members in question without letting them know that he knew something of what was going on behind the scenes. He wanted to guard against making targeted members more skittish than they already were.
He saw his domestic and foreign policies in the balance, and, more important, he saw his own future crumble before him—all his hopes, desires, aspirations—flicker before his mind’s eye. He knew that all his life had been directed to the time between now and January third. All his life! From that day as a young serviceman when he clasped the fence outside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, the early constant studying in college to do well, the struggle through law school to excel, the fancy social footwork to arrange a beneficial marriage that would boost him a little higher in the world, the long nights spent making a name for himself as a young lawyer, the rigorous campaigns for state and federal office, the tension, the mental and physical exhaustion, the struggle, struggle, struggle that had been his whole life without a moment’s relaxation or minute of tranquility.
There was nothing debonair or casual about Fred Thurston. His entire mind, body and life worked towards the White House, had always worked towards the White House. He was as tense as a timepiece, the coiled intensity, always in reserve, providing energy to every extremity of his body and soul. He never let down, never weakened, never left the public platform.
I can’t lose it, I can’t give it up, he thought. His time had come, he felt, the chance still stood before him—challenging him onward.
And yet he didn’t know what to do.
What he could do?
He couldn’t accurately judge what he was fighting. A ghost? A ghoul?
A secret!
A secret revealed to him by the momentary luck of coincidence, by the unexpected strength of one man’s honor, deep integrity and respect for fair play.
He knew when he considered the stakes that he’d rather have the secret on his side than Eric Stathis’s honor. Secrets were powerful in Washington; honorable men were not.
Thurston found himself damning Washington, damning the secrecy that gave the government and its institutions and the people caught up in them their impetus for survival and action. If honesty existed, he would be President of the United States on January third with no questions asked. He would actually be President.
The gap between his position as senior senator from Michigan and the Presidency hung like a heavy, red-hot iron around his neck, holding him down, deepening his morose mental wanderings. He poured more of the Johnnie Walker into his glass and lit another cigarette, gazing into the milky blue smoke that swirled into the soft glow from the lone light on his desk as he exhaled. He wouldn’t give up, he told himself, he couldn’t give up the fight. He’d literally spent his whole life, his whole conscious life, to win the prize now weeks, days from his grasp. The Presidency stood up be
fore his mind and haunted him as palpably as Macbeth’s dagger plagued and tormented him. The only way he could rest, the only way he could find some peace to assuage the desire urging him incessantly forward, ever onward, was to win that office!
This was Frederick Thurston’s only dream and it drove him ahead every day of his life, kept him awake at night, pushed and shoved him into the color, glitter and backbreaking agony that was American politics. That it could now, after so long, after so much work and pain, so much personal sacrifice, be snatched from his hands, plunged him down, down, down into the bottom reaches of his soul.
He was amazed that he wasn’t driven to high fury, exalted indignation and majestic anger. Too much of what Frederick Thurston was as a man was pragmatic, common, somewhat base—certainly not high-minded. And so at this moment his emotions, rather than illuminating the blackness of the night around him, in their sour strength and extremity, ate away at him and gnawed into the fiber of his being.
He’d recover, he thought. He always recovered. Tomorrow he would make the rounds again. He wouldn’t quit making the rounds. He felt his senses returning to him, what perspective he retained building into some vague course of action. He would at least know now not to angrily and contemptuously dismiss someone like Delamar. He would appeal to them first from the bottom of his heart. But he knew that he’d have to come up with something more powerful and influential than that. Big hearts had always been a premium in Washington, he thought with a silent, bitter smile.
Chapter 4
THE MONEY TRAIL
Jack got to his feet as St. Clair Island Club General Manager Santiago Ravelo led Ramona Fuentes to his table in the corner by a long row of French doors that looked out onto the green that separated his house from Flagler Hall. The maître d’, Luis Seijas, followed them with a menu. A waiter trailed behind.
“Jack, how are you?” asked Ramona as she leaned over for Jack to kiss her on the cheek.
