Born to Run (10 page)

What was going on inside Davey’s head became clear just after the wedding two years earlier. His doctors had suggested some new tests and it turned out that Davey wasn’t mute at all.
He was deaf, certainly, but there was no physiological impediment to him speaking.

Isabel had been witness to Ed’s understandable tangle of emotions: delight his son had speech, but distress at why he refused to use it.

Off her own bat, Ed’s assistant Debbie tracked down a psychologist who specialised in deaf kids. After three sessions with Davey, Professor Howard called Ed in. Isabel went with him and
they sat silent, watching a video of the doctor interviewing the boy in ASL.

Isabel spent as much time watching Ed as the video. She could see Ed tearing himself apart at the boy’s perverse theory. After his mother’s car accident, Davey had read the lips of
some adults gossiping that she had been “running off” with the man in the car. The little boy’s twisted logic was that Ed must’ve done something bad to her to make her run
away.

Isabel saw Ed shaking as Davey continued signing: “She went to heaven to run away from my daddy and I sent my voice up there to bring her back.”

THE revelation turned Ed’s already strong political partisanship into zealotry. Once he learned Davey was blaming him for his wife’s death, his hostility to the
Democrats and especially Isabel’s opponent, Bobby Foster, became very personal.

Ed had explained the whole story to Isabel, starting with Jane’s affair with former Democratic congressman Peter Jackson from New York. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Foster had been
the lawyer who helped the bastard escape any serious penalty for the charges, getting him just a paltry fine. A pittance for a life… lives.

“My wife dies, Davey loses his mom and that creep Jackson gets off scot-free, thanks to that slimy, sweet-talking Bobby Foster. Yet my son,” Ed choked, “my beautiful
boy… he blames me… and won’t talk to me because he sent…”

Ever since, Ed had despised Robert Foster and everything about him: his role in Jackson’s defence; his past career as a money-grubbing trial lawyer; even his glossy magazine good
looks.

When Foster got the Democratic Party’s nomination, Ed’s investigations dredged up some of Foster’s own passions; mostly of the tiresome variety that would plunge him into hot
water with his wife if she ever found out, something Ed had toyed with facilitating many times.

But what haunted Foster’s campaign—his own Karim Ahmed affair—was not his defence of Jackson, or even his infidelity… it was Joe Cook.

All these years after, few could stomach what Foster had done for his notorious rapist-murderer client. Harvard Law School taught that Foster’s strategy at Cook’s trial was a
model… of what not to do. He’d idealised Cook to the jury as an articulate and energetic white worker for black rights, a hapless victim of police who was standing in the wrong place
at the wrong time. It wasn’t even his gun! Mistaken identity. Foster tried it all, and enough of it worked. But within two months of the not-guilty verdict being handed down, cops from the
next precinct shot Cook dead as he clambered over the tenement rooftop of a young black mother and her two daughters, aged twelve and ten. Foster’s former star client had saved the
mother… for last.

“The wealthy defence attorney with political aspirations,” as the media liked to call him back then, took the opportunity to appear on TV that same night and, holding back tears,
told the world he was ditching the law for a life of public service in politics. It worked, with most of the country applauding him for ditching money for public duty as penance for his
mistake.

But Ed was not among them, vowing that one day Foster would pay. For all his mistakes.

S
NAP! BOBBY FOSTER and his inner-circle were ensconced in the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters in Atlanta, behind floor-to-ceiling
glass, partitioned from the bustle and clatter of the scores of volunteers working the phones. SNAP! Though neither Foster nor his running mate Mitchell Taylor hailed from Georgia, their
strategists had picked Atlanta to boost their support in the South. Maine was Foster’s home base and Mitch Taylor was an Iowa boy.

SNAP! The venetian privacy blind was yanked right up so—SNAP!—the “mamarazzi”, celebrity photographer Niki Abbott, could take whatever candid shots she wanted yet still
be out of earshot of campaign strategy. As always, her blue, signed Ted Williams Red Sox baseball cap was pressed down over her flaming red hair.

“Yes!” Mitch Taylor fisted the air with a spirited air-punch and shot a glance out of the corner of his eye to check if Niki had captured the moment for posterity. His victory cry
would have made more sense if the Foster-Taylor team’s polling had clicked over 50 percent rather than just 28 but, from the doldrums their campaign had previously been lolling in, any rise
needed celebrating.

“Thank yo-ou, Judge Thomas,” Taylor chuckled. The vice-presidential running mate winked at Don Thomas, the wily political strategy brain who headed up Foster’s campaign
machine. Don was a seasoned operator. He was also the judge’s brother.

But Don, a lantern-jawed Kentucky boy, winced at the hint of complicity. Not in his family. No way. His brother had tossed out the Karim Ahmed case because that’s how he cut the evidence.
It had nothing to do with his political sympathies or even Don’s job. Not with his brother’s fierce love for the law above all else. It was why no one, not even Ahmed’s defence
team, had asked Judge Thomas to recuse himself from the case.

Yet Don was too excited to let the family slur intrude on the moment. He placed his hand on Mitch Taylor’s shoulder, but—SNAP!—a flash from Niki’s camera temporarily
blinded him. “Mitch,” he said to Taylor, blinking away the starburst, “at 28 we ain’t even half of Diaz’s 62, but one thing’s for sure: our number’s going
up, and hers is coming down.” Don Thomas’s swaggering bravado seemed out of place for someone with such a pale face, bookish shoulders and a spine almost as bent as the question marks
he always had on his mind.

“There’s so much blue sky in here, we need sunglasses,” Taylor smiled, posing for Niki Abbott’s lens. Or was it for Niki herself? Don Thomas wondered, sucking in a deep
breath of frustration.

A
FTER ONLY SIX days of Don Thomas’ revised election strategy playing out, Isabel was being pushed more and more onto the back foot. Karim
Ahmed had suddenly vanished a second time. The entire nation’s media mounted a massive search for him but was coming up empty-handed. The timing was perfet and Don Thomas had Bobby Foster
asking all the right questions on every nightly news bulletin: “He won on a technicality, but does an innocent man run? Does he hide? This man, Isabel Diaz’s star protégé,
was claimed to have financed terrorists. Where is he now? Why won’t he come forward and explain himself?”

That Ahmed was not a public figure was beside the point. That the judge had let him go, likewise. Isabel’s support was nose-diving.
That
was the point. Down from its 70 percent to
55… already.

With seven weeks to Election Day, Isabel’s chances of victory looked like they’d be pole-axed unless she could arrest the slide. Publicly, she remained calm and restrained.
Stoic.

But deep in private, behind tightly closed doors, things were different. This was a crisis of the highest order for her campaign, for the Party… for the nation.

And it was time for a group of well-placed individuals to act. To take their next steps. Planning, precision, surprise and deniability were crucial. As usual.

They’d been readying for something like this even before Jax Mason’s fall from the 14th floor of a London office building. It was time to use what they’d taken from him. The
Diaz campaign was starting to reek with the stench of a slaughterhouse and they vowed, as such people do, to hose it clean. Isabel had to win; no matter what.

“It’s not just that we’d miss out on the White House,” Isis said, “though there is that. What stinks is that this pathetic duo, Foster and Taylor, might get to cup
the future of this great nation in their mauling paws. If it wasn’t for Ahmed, damn him, we’d still be wiping the floor with them… It’s time to roll out Phase
Two.”

Diana was in Georgia and had dialled into the meeting on a secure line. She liked her code-name. Goddess of the hunt carried a certain class, she decided, and that Diana was an emblem of
chastity added a pinch of somewhat ironic spice.

F
OSTER AND TAYLOR had been dithering over whether to accept the Secret Service protective detail they’d been offered for the campaign, a
privilege all major candidates were entitled to since Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. After struggling with its privacy drawbacks, the pair had only just said yes, resigned that in twenty-four
hours they’d no longer have some of the freedoms they liked to enjoy on the campaign trail.

Isabel had not a second’s compunction about accepting the protection, though she hadn’t expected her detail chief’s bluntness. “Ma’am,” he’d said when
he first briefed her, “I don’t want to create any false expectations. If someone’s committed to killing you, well… they’ll probably do it. My job is simply to make it
as hard as possible.”

FROM under her blue baseball cap, and with her camera tote bag over her shoulder, Niki Abbott phoned up to Mitch Taylor’s room from the hotel lobby. “Ready for our
breakfast shoot, Mr Vice-President?” she said provocatively. It was still weeks ahead of Election Tuesday, but she was confident he’d find it an alluring hook.

“Uhmmh?” He rolled over to squint at the clock. “It’s only… ah… six. Weren’t we scheduled at 7:30?”

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said, with a lilt calculated to intensify his memory of yesterday’s seductive wink. She’d arranged to photograph him
breakfasting alone in an elegant private dining room with the morning’s papers spread out before him. It would pitch him, she said, as the contemplative man in the background, ready to step
forward and serve as number one if needed. Though a Republican, Niki was fine with the scam. The shots would be huge for her, too; her agent had negotiated a five-figure pre-sale with Reuters for
nationwide syndication. She loved elections.

Bobby Foster had already flown back to DC. He’d be breakfasting with congressional leaders and then had three back-to-back radio talkback interviews, all of which he’d planned for
turning up the heat on Isabel over Ahmed’s ominous disappearance.

“I guess,” said Niki, her pout almost protruding out the other end of the phone, “I’ll just have to wait by my lonesome down here in the lobby till
7:30…”

Taylor’s bio described him as happily married with three children. His wasn’t as long a marriage as Bobby Foster’s but it was almost as tempestuous and, like Foster, that was
mostly his own fault. Yet, Julia Taylor was always the good wife, putting up with his antics just as Foster’s wife had so far tolerated his.

“Er, Niki, why don’t we, er, do a pre-breakfast breakfast? You know, up here. Get to know each other a bit better. Then later, we can focus on the, er, shots and not the, er, small
talk?”

She smiled as his voice struggled, trying not to crack like a teenager buying his first condom.

“I’ll leave the door unlatched,” he said, “while I’m, er, taking a shower. You can call up room service. I’ll leave my order on the table and you can put it
through with yours. Suite 2302.”

A highly polished black brogue was holding the door to the suite open and, as she pushed inside, she heard the pelting of water in the shower—music to her ears. She picked up the shoe,
looked back to check in the corridor and quietly double-locked the door.

She thought of snapping him in the nude—someone, though not Reuters, would really pay for that—but what she had planned would be better. Niki carefully put her treasured baseball cap
on the hallstand and huffed her camera gear to the floor, lifted a pocket flap and pulled out two small objects and slipped them into place.

She decided not to call room service, not yet; she and Mitch didn’t need interruptions or witnesses and, having turned up the radio in the room to muffle the noise for when the shower
finished, she drew her one-piece suit’s front zipper down from her collar to her crotch as she walked across to the bathroom. She smiled and paused when she caught herself in the mirror, and
spread open her top to expose her breasts. She licked her thumbs and forefingers and tweaked and rubbed her dark brown nipples stimulating them into short thick shafts almost as hard as the shiny
metal cylinder she’d slid over one of her teeth.

She didn’t really need to be aroused ahead of what she was about to do but persuaded herself not to waste the opportunity. She flicked her red hair forward and curled her lips into her
fail-safe fuck-me pout and stood for a moment, her hands on her hips, taking in the sight. Maybe she should get out a camera for a quick self-portrait? Niki worked as hard at her body as her moves.
She was as taut and springy as a silk strap uplifting a porn star’s bra, though with her mounds Niki never wore one, squeezing by with nipple-tight shirts and Ts.