Born to Run (38 page)

The questioner kept badgering him, almost hysterically now:

The Secretary pulled himself up to his full six-foot-one:

But the reporter wouldn’t give in:

“
America is not Tunisia or Egypt or Lib
…”

Ed grabbed for the remote and switched off the TV. “Triple assassination!” he exclaimed. “What crap!”

The screen-flash from the TV burnt Ed’s strange reaction into Dr Cisco’s mind. He reminded himself that he was drained from working under high stress all night without a break, and
that it had been years since he’d felt pressure anything close to this, so he dismissed his jumpiness about Isabel’s husband as being due to that and tried to calm himself by scratching
useless notes onto her chart.

Davey tugged again. He signed, “Is Isabel going to die?”

“Ask Dr Cisco yourself,” George said, letting Davey read his lips and swinging his own eyes back onto Ed. He had the same reaction as the doctor to Ed’s comment.

Cisco had vaguely overheard George, but had no idea what question he would be answering for Davey so he slipped the chart back into its slot and raised his head, “Ask me what?” He
licked his lower lip.

Without shifting his eyes away from Ed, George repeated Davey’s question.

Cisco nodded and sighed, “Ms Diaz has quite a few problems,” he began, and when Davey’s hands flew to his mouth in terror, Cisco continued, “but she will be okay,”
saying it slowly so the boy understood. “We gave her some medicine to make her sleep. She’ll be awake in…,” he glanced at the clock on the wall, “two hours, maybe
three.” An assuring smile broke out over the doctor’s tired, furrowed face and he tousled Davey’s hair. “Can you wait till then, little man?”

Davey bobbed his head and gave a little gleeful hop, and took George’s hand.

George’s eyes kept drilling into Ed.

NIKI Abbott splashed naked out of the tropical waters to find her valet standing guard where she’d tossed her clothes. Mario had unfurled a towel like a white flag of
submission and, as though they’d already been lovers, she ran up to him and let him wrap it around her from behind, snuggling her back into him.

The pair stood silently, both facing the sea. Niki nudged his arms aside and let the towel slide between them to the sand. Purposefully, she grabbed behind through Mario’s loincloth and
gave a strong tug, smiled and ran off from him high-stepping into the low lapping surf. Mario pulled the side-knot open and, inspired, hung the crimson cloth off himself and sped after her,
laughing as the fabric flapped from side to side.

“C
HIEF AGENT FRANKLIN, General Loane, special agent in charge of the President’s personal protective division. I gotta discuss your
wife’s condition with the doctor, sir.”

Franklin’s tone and bearing were flinty and matter-of-fact, which even to Ed smacked as being frosty, as though the President’s shock asthma attack before Franklin’s own eyes
had only been as bothersome as a fishbone in the throat. The arch in Franklin’s eyebrow was pushing Ed out of the room, but the former general stood his ground.

But the special agent wasn’t accustomed to resistance. “In private, sir,” he pressed.

Ed drew back his cuff and glimpsed his watch. “I’ve got to make a call,” he grunted and edged past Franklin out of the room, no mean feat since the man was almost as broad as
the door itself.

Together with two members of the President’s Cabinet and a crack team of security specialists, Franklin had just flown in on one of the President’s two specially configured Boeing
747-200Bs. In this contingent, Franklin was the only one who had been with President Foster on his fateful flight the night before, though he wasn’t offering any details, certainly not to Ed.
Like Ed, the agent had not slept, so Ed decided that Franklin’s personal presence here meant all was not well with the President, and that his instincts only a few hours ago when listening to
the Secretary of State’s press conference were correct.

Security in and around the hospital had blown out from locals leaning on the wall when Ed first arrived, to armed guards posted at every corner. The Secret Service had also set up outside the
building a 100-feet, no-cross cordon, which was being enforced by police rushed in from all over the county and a few dozen more who’d come in from neighbouring counties even though they
hadn’t actually been asked to. The journalists, cold, tired and cranky were pushed well back, with all the gawkers, hardly the kind of equal opportunity that they believed America stood
for.

Manifold was crawling with police and emergency personnel and security checks, and police roadblocks covered all incoming land routes. Continually circling in the air were two 767
AWACS—airborne warning and control system aircraft—with their distinctive thirty-foot rotating radar domes mounted above their fuselage. F-15s and F-16s flashed and boomed across the
sky. Apart from these authorised aircraft, the town’s airspace had been reclassified as a no-fly zone with a shoot-on-sight protocol, and the TV networks who’d pointlessly sent their
news choppers were furious.

President Foster was alive and well? Yeah right, Ed sniggered as he glanced out of the hospital window at the frenzy. The media were thinking the same thing: if Foster was alive, why was Isabel
Diaz getting all this, frankly, presidential treatment?

But those who knew the facts weren’t talking.

T
EMPORARILY ALONE TO make the call on the secure phone she’d requested from the special agent, Isabel pondered the answer she’d just
been given and edged her head toward the hubbub of security outside her window. She winced as she turned back for a sip of water, resting the phone on her chest so she could reach the glass with
her good hand. Refreshed, she picked up the phone again and said abruptly, “Noted. That’s all from Isis.”

THE hospital staff and security personnel couldn’t help but notice Ed’s exclusion from Isabel’s room; and likewise George who, with Davey, was at the far end
of the same corridor on their way back from an afternoon snack at the cafeteria.

“Why isn’t she being sworn in right here and right now?” Ed demanded. Finally given the chance to confront the Secretary of State directly, Ed was going to push it, his pug
nose a mere three inches away from Bert Robinson’s as the two men faced off right outside Isabel’s hospital room. Invading personal space was precisely Ed’s objective. Isabel had
been fully awake for two hours now and, for some unexplained reason, was conspiring with the recently arrived officials to exclude Ed from the discussions. Getting aggressive, he calculated, was
the best way to insinuate himself back in, and he didn’t give a damn who might be tut-tutting about it behind his back.

Ed was convinced that President Foster was dead but also that, for whatever reason, the Administration—or what was left of it—was concealing that fact from the American public, and
thwarting Isabel’s rightful elevation. What the hell were they up to? Ed pondered. Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in only an hour-and-a-half after JFK was pronounced dead in Dallas. The brief
ceremony, Ed recalled from the famous photographs, had been held on board the presidential plane while it was still on the ground at Love Field.

Beneath his nose, Ed could see the Secretary’s hand clamped over a thick dossier. What Ed didn’t know was that it included those photos from 1963 as well as other, mostly classified,
precedent material.

Ed noticed that the agent posted on duty at Isabel’s door had turned his head away from the skirmish with the Secretary. Perhaps he was onside and signalling to Ed that it was safe for him
to come forward. Ed stepped around Robinson and managed to open the door just a crack.

“Isabel…,” Ed called through the small opening, pushing it wider but the agent blocked him from taking a step inside.

“Not now,” she snapped from her bed, declining to even look at him and lowering her eyes back to the files spread out on her lap. Her commanding abruptness threw all of them, Ed
included.

She buried her head in the papers and, when the silence in the room forced her to look back up a minute later and she saw him still standing with his hand on the doorknob, she insisted that the
agent close the door.

Ed put her gruffness down to her trauma, or maybe the drugs. What else it could be?

George knew. At least, he knew the part about Ed’s affair. He’d foamed when Isabel had told him. “Show me the damn video,” he said, strangely satisfied that all his
contempt for Ed was now proved justified.

But Isabel had refused. “Personal drama belongs in the background right now, okay?” she said. “But promise me you’ll say nothing… especially to Ed. And Davey,
too.”

AFTER the Secretary of State’s impromptu media conference in DC, he and Marcus Bentley, Foster’s Attorney General, had buckled up next to each other on the flight
from Andrews Air Force Base to talk to Isabel. They’d shared many trips over the years; both started in politics as assistant secretaries in the Clinton Administration and, during the
politically lean years before Obama, managed to hew illustrious and remunerative careers for themselves outside politics, one in law and the other in electronics, crossing paths frequently and
making life easier for each other when they could. They were great friends, and so was Mitch Taylor before his death. The three went back a long way, and with Foster too. But Marcus Bentley and
Bert Robinson were also hard-nosed professionals and weren’t going to let sudden personal grief blur their focus on the gravest matter of state either had ever been charged with.

Neither had been with the President when the attack happened, but they’d heard it all from Chief Franklin who had phoned the two of them at 3 AM, joining them into the one call and saying
he was under strict instructions from the President to speak to the two of them, and only them.

Franklin had explained how the President wanted them to be ready on a moment’s notice if, heaven forbid, his condition deteriorated and Isabel in fact needed to be sworn in. That was
President Foster’s Plan B, he said, though he declined to reveal Plan A even when Robinson pressed him. And despite both men screaming down the phone line, Franklin also refused to say where
the President actually was.

Robinson and Bentley saw they were in the vortex of a potentially paralysing constitutional crisis.

They knew that under the Presidential Succession Law, if Foster died—or was
already
dead—Isabel would automatically step into his role. Permanently! After her mother’s
revelation on FOX there was no longer any impediment, since any doubt that Isabel was not a natural-born citizen had been quashed.

On their flight over to Manifold, even the engine noise couldn’t drown out the concentrated hush that bore down on the pair as they read and swapped files, and exchanged whispers.

Neither man could believe the coincidences… first Mitch Taylor, then the President… thank God, Bobby was okay… well, at least Franklin kept telling them he was. But if he
was fine, then why the urgency surrounding the contingency plan?

BACK in the corridor, Ed once again challenged Secretary Robinson, “The President
is
dead, isn’t he? Yet you’re delaying, putting up every block you
can to stop…”

“You say that, General,” Robinson replied, emphasising Ed’s title to remind him that the chain of command was civilian over military. He stepped forward even closer. “But
in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re still running this show,” which Robinson hoped was true, though by now his need to speak personally to the President was reaching a point of
quiet desperation.

“Robinson,” said Ed, the snarl on his face betraying his contempt for the Secretary. “You call this running…”

“I’ll take my chances with history,” Robinson interrupted and, as he turned to the door to Isabel’s room, the agent posted there started opening it for him.

Ed grabbed Robinson’s shoulder and stopped him. “If the shit hits the fan, Robinson, what then? Who the hell’s in charge of this country?”

“The President. Who else?” Robinson snapped, praying he was correct, though uncomfortably unsure. He hoped that would change after he spoke to Foster in an hour’s time, a call
Chief Franklin had arranged.

Ed swung himself in front of the Secretary. Threateningly, Ed let the tip of his nose actually touch Robinson’s this time, then suddenly, as though he’d achieved his objective, Ed
pulled back, knocking Robinson into the door before heading to the washroom.

Bert Robinson might have been as tall as Ed but he was wiry and slight. It was why he’d got the wading bird nickname Crane in college. He stood there shaking. To calm himself, he leant
back against the insipid green wall and, to make his nervousness less obvious, he removed his glasses, held the lenses up toward the fluorescent light, and hurred two sharp breaths onto them before
wiping them with his tie. But his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. Winding the wire back over his ears and doing his best to mimic a cheery wink to the agent on guard, he took a deep breath and
pushed himself inside Isabel’s room to get back to finalising the arrangements.