Born to Run (8 page)

Felipe’s sharp eyes catch a split-second glimmer in the rear vision mirror. It isn’t Diaz; his Chilean boss is twenty feet ahead of the car and is humming that damn
Bésame
Mucho
again.

Felipe turns silently, his intense eyes scanning, his hand imperceptibly reaching for his shoulder holster—in this country you can’t be too prepared—but he sees who it is and
his arm relaxes. Stupidly, he eases off the brake so Rosinante can canter quietly down the slope in the moonlight but her tyres crunch the stones and snap Diaz out of his contemplation of the
evening’s events.

Before Diaz can complete his head-turn, a shot rings out and the bullet punches through his neck, catapulting him over the edge.

Like many before, and after.

Diaz’s favourite tune floats through his head as he falls:
como si fuera esta noche, la última vez
; as if tonight is the last time.

Music can be prescient. Barrientos was right.

I
SABEL’S CAMPAIGN MANAGER crossed his legs, tugging the navy blue extra-fine merino wool cuff down over his red sock just so. Gregory Samson
knew they were silk Zegnas; the socks, that is. The suit was Armani, made from Australian super-fine wool, but Gregory wasn’t one to shout out his discernment for fear it would be yet another
way to bring attention to his prematurely balding head.

The only obsession Gregory fussed over more than his appearance, apart from his fix of Diet Coke twenty-four hours a day, was managing Isabel: her program, the ads, the slogans, her speeches,
whom she spoke to, where she went, how she got there, what she said, where she ate, what she drank—usually water, occasionally a Virgin Mary—what TV programs she appeared on, what TV
she watched, what she wore, and more importantly, what she didn’t wear. Once, he had tried to get her to wear high necks to hide her scar, but she refused, saying, “I am what I
am.” She did go along with greys and blues though, to distinguish her from the shouty reds and other bright colours so many other women politicians favoured and to avoid, as Gregory said, the
inevitable cliché with Rosa being her middle name. Gregory worried about every detail.

He wasn’t as snug with Isabel as family, he knew that, but he was as close as any outsider could get. At least he believed so. Maybe not as close as Democrat Spencer Prentice—a
relationship Gregory considered weird—but close enough. Nothing but nothing went to Isabel without it coming to Gregory first—everyone in the campaign knew that—unless some pushy
press reptile managed to slither past, in which cases the candidate annoyingly did as she pleased, which was usually fine he had to admit, and which infuriated him even more than the reptiles
themselves. But really… it was his job to keep her clear of the mundane and, despite her instincts, there was no way she could see all the balls being tossed at her. She was only human, a
weakness his campaign strategy had turned into a strength… a giant, hopefully sustainable and therefore unbeatable 70-percent strength.

Gregory spoke at a hundred miles an hour, and he thought twice as fast which meant he sometimes fell over himself, not often, mind you; just occasionally.

Isabel adored him, but he made Ed cringe. To him, Gregory was a bald, pain-in-the-butt motor-mouth who, when he was a kid playing hide-and-seek would probably have been the one the other kids
wouldn’t even bother looking for. Plus Ed couldn’t stand the guy’s voice. It wasn’t that Ed didn’t like Aussies. He’d fought beside many of them, and they were
top troops, right up with the best. But Gregory’s stream of consciousness wrapped inside his nasal whine exhausted Ed. “Julia Gillard on speed but with better hair” was how one
news clip had described Gregory’s voice. Despite Isabel backing Gregory as being brilliant, Ed just didn’t see it.

“I told you we had to watch out for this,” Gregory truthfully reminded Isabel. “And when we least need it, just when we’ve got Muslim America back in our tent eating
olives out of our hands, that twisted…,” he paused when he saw her scowl, “…
creep
spits the damn seeds right in our face.”

“Enough!” Isabel said, charitably assuming the pressure had gotten to him. “Our campaign doesn’t talk or think like that!”

She
didn’t talk like that, but Gregory knew from his polling that 30 percent of Americans did; he took a slurp of Diet Coke to stop himself from telling her that. This time, his
mouth had really got ahead of his mind.

KARIM Ahmed was one of Isabel’s many success stories or more accurately, he had been. His father, Hakim, an Iraqi chemical engineer, had fled with his family as refugees
to America after the first Gulf War. Hakim started out mopping floors in a Newark outlet of Isabel’s BBB restaurant chain; coincidentally the city where Isabel had been born. Despite being a
practising Muslim, Karim’s father always hand-painted Isabel a Christmas card incorporating both traditional geometric elements and Christian icons—he was a fine artist who believed his
new life exemplified how different cultures could cohabit contentedly. Every year his card offered his and his wife Najeeba’s thanks for the opportunities Isabel had provided for their
family. By the time their son Karim was graduating high school, Hakim had risen to become manager of the LaGuardia airport BBB, one of the chain’s busiest and most profitable. Karim was a
straight-A student, blitzing his final examinations and topping his class. He’d done well in his SATs and was desperate to take the undergraduate course at NYU’s Stern Business School
but he’d narrowly missed a scholarship and the fees were a killer.

Isabel had gone to LaGuardia to take the shuttle to Boston and, as she often did, wandered over to visit the BBB restaurant, one of the hundreds she already owned at that time.

“Hakim, why doesn’t Karim apply for a BBB family scholarship?” she asked.

“There is such a scheme?” he asked.

There was, from that moment on, and Karim got to go to NYU.

To the Ahmed family’s surprise, Isabel turned up at Karim’s graduation, a tradition she maintained for all employees and their kids until she was elected to Congress and had to step
away from the business.

“What’s that?” Karim asked, looking at the envelope Isabel had just popped into the black mortarboard cap he was holding upside-down, like a dish.

“Murray’s finally bought that ranch, Karim, and he’s aiming to retire in a few years. He needs a number two.”

He didn’t need to be the whiz that he was to know that she was offering him a job as assistant to BBB’s Chief Financial Officer, Murray Byron. Karim nodded, unable to speak. He knew
about the CFO’s long-talked-about retirement plans—part of his scholarship had involved him interning with Murray during university vacations—but this!

“Eventually, Murray’s gonna head back to Texas to raise cattle, so BBB needs to start developing someone to jump into his saddle. Any ideas, Karim?”

Hakim and Najeeba looked at each other in disbelief. “We love America,” said Najeeba, her smile broader than the Tigris. “And we love you, Isabel.”

Hakim hugged her, “You are like a sister to us.”

KARIM became one of Isabel’s hand-picked business intimates and slid easily and naturally into Murray’s CFO role two years before BBB was sold into an Initial
Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. By then, she’d left the board and distanced herself from the business as part of her campaign to get elected to Congress. Even so,
Karim’s betrayal had come as a shock to her.

Spencer Prentice, too, had been aghast. Though now a congressman himself, but on the opposite side of the aisle, he had long been Isabel’s confidante and during the IPO process had been
investment banker to the deal. Having observed Karim at very close quarters he was impressed. At due diligence meetings, Spencer cross-examined the young CFO on everything: the budget items and
expenses that concerned him, teasing out how reliable the revenue forecasts were, understanding what could go wrong with the business’s profit levers, querying the veracity of the internal
systems. Everything. Even in the face of sustained probing, Karim hadn’t missed a beat.

“The best CFO I’ve seen in years,” Spencer had told investors and analysts.

So it was especially awkward when, only two months after BBB listed on the exchange, one of the audit juniors unearthed the fraud. He’d been up late ahead of the release of BBB’s
first quarterly financial report and from the moment he tripped over the first tiny irregularity to Karim taking flight, it was only a few hours. Karim had misappropriated over four million
dollars.

Market confidence in BBB Inc. was punctured the moment the chairman simultaneously announced the fraud and Karim Ahmed’s disappearance. The stock price haemorrhaged. BBB had been sold into
the IPO at $30 per share. In those first two months of public trading, despite weak markets, the stock had still spiked up a solid 20 percent to $36, so the sudden plunge to $20 had seriously
hurt.

Investors, the media, as well as Isabel’s opponents wanted a scapegoat. Fingers pointed in every direction, many at her. The headlines and newsbars were already clattering:
Fraud
smashes BBB but Burger Queen rolls in dough
, and worse.

As soon as she’d heard the news, Isabel got put through to BBB’s chairman who was in the middle of a crisis board meeting. Spencer was with him, and they both left the boardroom to
take her call.

“Isabel,” said Spencer with more than a hint of anxiety, “This isn’t your concern. You don’t need to do this.” She had offered an ex gratia payment, a gift to
the company of the entire sum Ahmed had defrauded. Four million dollars.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she told the two of them. “The investors who bought in at the IPO saw BBB as my company…”

“But you haven’t been involved for…”

“Whatever. They saw Karim as my man. They see this as my problem. Even if you don’t, I do. You’re telling me that Karim was doing this for years, so it started on my
watch.”

The chairman smiled into the speakerphone. “It’s over-generous but you’re probably right. And it’ll certainly go a long way to relieving the board in the other
room.”

“Not the whole way?”

“The market will still be worrying whether there’s more bad news to come.”

“Same deal. If there’s anything I should’ve known, I’m good for that too.”

There was more bad news, but when it broke Isabel could do little about it. The Islamic charity in Chicago that Karim had been syphoning off the funds to was a front for a terrorist enclave.

Even though no one could seriously put that at Isabel’s feet, it would continue to haunt her campaign.

I
T TOOK OVER two years for authorities to capture Karim Ahmed and months after that for his trial to start, by this time smack in the middle of
Isabel’s tilt for the presidency. Each day of court proceedings aimed new shots at her campaign, but they were only flesh wounds so far, despite Bobby Foster’s team blowing up every
micro-development into a blunderbuss attack. Then one morning it stopped. The judge threw the case out on a technicality—evidence illegally obtained—and neither side of politics was
happy.