Brink of Chaos (29 page)

Deborah was almost to the elevator. A few stragglers dashed past her to get down to the convention hall. In the background she could hear the echoes of the announcer and the crowd cheering in the arena.

She heard the buzz. She flipped open her Allfone. It was from Gallagher.

Her question had been simple enough:

In the elevator Deborah punched the button for the floor of the war room. As the doors closed, she knew what she had to do, though it had all the appeal of grabbing a wasp’s nest with her bare hands. She had to get Secret Service Agent Owens aside, show him Gallagher’s text, and explain the phony email in the bottom of Zeta Milla’s purse. She also had to explain the background information that Pack McHenry had dug up about Milla’s real connection to the Castro regime and her history as an assassin-for-hire.

Okay, Deborah thought, she would have a lot of explaining to do herself — like why she was acquiring intel about Milla in the first place and how she had joined the staff under an assumed name. Yes, she knew she might even be suspected of foul play herself. But all of that was a calculated risk, well worth it if Zeta Milla could be exposed before something happened to Senator Hewbright.

The elevator doors opened, and Deborah sprinted out just in time to see Rick heading down the stairwell.

“Rick,” she cried out, “have you seen Agent Owens?”

“Uh, yeah … awhile ago. He’s always hanging around the senator.” Then Rick said, “I’m taking the stairs to the arena; it’s faster. Don’t want to miss — hey,” he said as if he had remembered something, “they were looking for you in the private suite.” Then he turned and headed down the stairs two at a time.

Deborah jogged into the war room. It was cleared out. No signs of anyone.

She stepped into the hallway. A second buzz on her Allfone. It was the second short message from Gallagher.

Be careful, kiddo.

At the end of the corridor, the door to Senator Hewbright’s private suite opened. Zeta Milla emerged, dressed for the evening, very classy. Her hands were thrust in the side pockets of her designer suit jacket, and a Gucci briefcase was tucked under her arm.

“Hey, there,” Zeta yelled cheerfully, “we were looking for you. The senator has a quick errand for you.”

For an instant, as time stopped, Deborah looked down the long hallway at Zeta Milla and wished she had more time. Thinking of Gallagher’s warning, she thought to herself,
Sorry, John. Can’t do
.

Deborah caught her breath, manufactured a smile, and strode down the hallway toward Zeta Milla.

Milla let Deborah pass by her and walk into Senator Hewbright’s suite. Deb had taken only a few steps into the penthouse suite before she was startled by the sound of the door slamming behind her. Zeta was behind her, her hands no longer in her pockets. She held a briefcase by the handle and wore latex gloves.

Deborah scanned the room. She could see a pair of feet lying on the carpet, extending from behind the cabinets of the kitchenette. She took a step in that direction and recognized the dark suit and light blue tie of the man lying there. In the middle of Agent Owen’s white shirt was a small blackened hole and the blood that encircled it.

Deb lifted her eyes. Senator Hewbright was also on the floor of the kitchenette, but from what Deb could tell, he was still alive. His eyes were wide and his mouth covered in duct tape. The cabinet doors under the sink were open and his hands were handcuffed together around the pipe.

When she turned toward the door, Zeta was there, almost touching her, pointing a handgun with a silencer at Deborah’s face.

“Sit down, dear,” Milla said calmly.

Deborah did as she was told, easing onto the soft chair in the living room but not taking her eyes off Milla.

“You know,” the woman said, “I had a plan before I knew that you were coming. Crude. But it would have been effective. But when you walked into this campaign, I knew how very perfect you would be.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Deborah said.

“Oh, but I do.”

“Why —”

“Don’t bother trying to understand,” Milla said. “You Jordans think you can outsmart the world. You — the young West Point graduate — did you really think you were going to outsmart me?” Zeta laughed with a guttural tone. It had the sound of something hideous and evil.

“But you should know something,” Milla continued. “How your love for Senator Hewbright will not go unnoticed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How you stalked him and came here under an assumed name. Yes, I know that too. How your romantic obsession with him slowly became psychotic.”

Deborah’s eyes flashed. “You’re crazy.”

“Oh?” Then Zeta Milla, with her other hand in her briefcase, pulled out some invoices. “Then what do you think the authorities will say about these … motel receipts with your name on them — having paid in cash each time, of course, showing your many liaisons with the good senator at those times when I know he would have been alone and without witnesses — except for Agent Owens.”

Milla glanced over at the agent’s body. “Oh, dear, and he’s gone too. Well, they’ll find the receipts in your pockets, along with the
note about how enraged you were at finding out that the senator had feelings for me. A murder-suicide … a fairly common syndrome, I’m afraid.”

“No one will believe it,” Deborah spit back. “My father and mother will hunt you down and expose all of this.”

“I doubt that, but even if they do, it will be too late. Senator Hewbright will be permanently unavailable as a candidate, because in your rage — you killed him. Before you committed suicide, of course. They will find the gun in your hand, and I will tell them how I witnessed the whole awful bloody ordeal. Which leaves Governor Tucker as the dark horse candidate here at the convention. As you know, he doesn’t stand a chance of winning, especially after his political party gets smeared with this grotesque spectacle.” Then she added, “Deborah, dear — really — by being here, you really gave me the perfect gift. Thanks, darling.”

A knock on the door.

Deborah froze.

Zeta calmly walked closer to the door but kept the long barrel of the gun pointed at Deborah. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Room service. Delivery for the senator.”

“No, thank you. He’s taking a nap right now. Just leave it outside, please.”

“Oh, boy,” came the voice from the other side. “My manager’s going to throw a fit. All the candidates are supposed to get one of these baskets. I need to say I’ve passed it off to someone up here or he’s going to come up here himself and blow a gasket.”

Zeta Milla waved with the gun barrel for Deborah to stand up. Then she said in a hoarse whisper, “Take the basket and close the door. If you do anything I don’t like, I’ll blow a hole in your back.”

Milla stepped to the side, out of range of the door, with her gun trained on Deborah.

Opening the door, Deborah saw a middle-aged man in a white service jacket, holding a basket. He had a pleasant smile. As she reached for it, he pushed his way forward, entering the suite and staring right into Deborah’s eyes with a look that seemed to be telegraphing
something. “Sorry, but I need you to sign for this,” he said and looked around the room as if he were deciding where to set the basket down.

FBI Agent Ben Boling, in the room-service outfit, smiled at Deborah as she signed for the basket, and he looked around the room without moving his head.

When he looked to his right, he saw Zeta standing just around the corner. The glass cabinet across the room had caught her reflection, and Boling could see the gun in her extended hand.

Instantly, he pushed Deborah to the ground, dropping the basket, and in a swooping motion turned the corner toward Milla. He fired a shot but missed. She returned fire and hit Boling in the chest. He collapsed to the floor.

Zeta moved out from around the corner and fired again but narrowly missed Boling’s neck. Before Zeta could hit him again, Deborah leaped at the gun barrel and knocked it as it fired. A lamp on the other side of the room shattered. There was a momentary struggle for the gun, but Milla kicked Deborah ferociously in the knee-cap, then in the groin, and stomped her shin, all in rapid succession until Deborah faltered. Then Zeta swung the handgun violently to Deborah’s face and pistol-whipped her to the ground.

She took direct aim at Deborah’s head as she stood over her.

But a blast dropped Zeta to the ground like a marionette without strings. The bullet to the side of Zeta Milla’s head from Ben Boling’s Smith and Wesson was fatal.

Deborah scampered over to Boling, who was trying to talk but could only emit a gasping noise because of the hole in his lung. She leaped to her feet and ran into the hallway, where a security guard and a campaign staffer were already responding to the sound of shots.

“Man down, man down!” she screamed. “Get an EMT right now!”

It was evening and Alexander Coliquin was in his top-floor suite, standing before the glass portico, one thousand two hundred feet and eighty-eight floors up from the pavement below. The skyline of the crown jewel of the United Arab Emirates was spread out before him, twinkling like the stars in the night sky.

He was not a man to show inner turmoil. His man servant bowed and presented a cup of jasmine tea on a solid gold platter. Coliquin took it and smiled as the servant disappeared. No one could have guessed the news he had just received. That his dear Zeta — whom he knew as Maria — was gone. Forever. He lifted his left hand and studied the ring on his finger. It was a gold-and-silver replica of a snake with ruby eyes, devouring its own tail. He recalled the day in Bora-Bora when he and Maria had been wed, with these matching rings, in a simple ceremony performed by a local Shaman.

He was not one to commit exclusively to a single lover, and he had assured her of that before their wedding night. But she had only kissed him and playfully replied, “Neither am I.”

But even more than her capacity for both playfulness and cruelty, Coliquin treasured her other talents as well: her ability for artful deception and her skillful execution of targets — without hesitation. She had a unique kind of innovation and creativity. For her, the setup, the game, and the killing, was an art form. Few possessed what she had. And now Coliquin’s beautiful weapon was gone.

But there was an even bigger complication.
What if
, he thought,
despite all my efforts, Senator Hewbright becomes the next president of the United States?

Coliquin had watched the convention coverage from Denver. Every second of it. He checked every Internet news service, searching for any hint of what had transpired that night in the Pepsi Center when his precious instrument, his beautiful partner, had been shot in the head. But there was nothing. He found it infuriating that his plan, even if it had failed, would not at least have tainted the convention with the bloody tale of near-assassination. Incredibly, they had managed to cover it up, kept it from the American public.

So when Hewbright appeared on stage so repulsively triumphant, confident, and energetic, to deliver his acceptance speech, as if nothing had happened, Coliquin took that as a personal slight. It was as if the idea of a contrived murder-suicide had never existed. Yet even though the scheme failed, Coliquin was convinced that the right kind of media spin about the shootout could have imprinted Hewbright’s campaign with a negative image, like an ugly birthmark. But that had been stolen from him.

Now people would have to pay. Those responsible — and maybe even those who were not. Failure never meant having to forego revenge.

When he heard the chimes from the front door of his penthouse, he knew he had business to attend to. It was Faris D’Hoestra and his powerful industrialist associate, Deter Von Gunter, a member of his World Builders group. He buzzed them both into the room.

D’Hoestra was not a man to linger. “I’ve come all the way to Abu Dhabi,” he began, “as you requested. It seems a long trip for a very simple issue.”

“You mean the U.N. charter amendment? Not so simple.”

“Well, that is why we’re here.” D’Hoestra glanced down at the couch and asked, “Shall we sit?”

“No need,” Coliquin replied. “I said it wasn’t simple. I didn’t say it was impossible. I know what you want — a restructuring. You want the U.N. Security Council to slowly ebb into oblivion, to be replaced
by your super committee, so the World Builders can have a dominant role through your own assortment of international members.”

Coliquin pulled an envelope from his suit-coat pocket. “Here’s a draft agreement from a number of key nations willing to sign on to your plan and submit it to the General Assembly for a formal amendment to the charter.”

D’Hoestra began to reach for it, adding, “And it has your official endorsement, I trust?”

“Of course,” Coliquin replied, still hanging onto the envelope.

“And what do you expect in return?”

“Your support. And that of the Builders.”

“Is that all?”

“For now.”

Coliquin threw a look at Deter Von Gunter who was standing nearby with a blank expression. “Deter,” he said waving the envelope, “why don’t you have a seat. While Mr. D’Hoestra and I chat privately.”

Then Coliquin led Faris D’Hoestra through the glass doors to the sweeping patio outside. D’Hoestra took in the panorama of the night sky and the lights of Abu Dhabi below. “Beautiful,” he murmured to Coliquin who was standing on his right side, smiling.

Coliquin, glancing back through the glass toward Von Gunter, said with his hand on D’Hoestra’s shoulder, “You and I can be blunt. This U.N. charter proposal was not easy for me to obtain, but I know the leverage you have. You’ve played the game well. Next time I won’t cave in so easily.”

He slipped the envelope into the inside pocket of D’Hoestra’s suit coat and patted his chest. “Now,” Coliquin added, “we have a few loose ends to tie up.” Then he glanced down at his own left shoe. “Like an untied shoe.”

D’Hoestra looked down and noticed Coliquin’s left shoelace was untied. While Coliquin bent down to tie it, D’Hoestra stepped up to the white chest-high stone wall that separated the portico at the top of the sky-scrapper from the thin air beyond. He took a furtive glance over the edge and straight down to the ground over a thousand feet
below. Instinctively, he took a step backward. But a hand grasped his right ankle like a vise.

A look of shock spread over D’Hoestra’s face as Coliquin, with his right hand still locked on to D’Hoestra’s ankle, reached up with his left hand and grabbed the World Builder chairman by the back of his belt.

D’Hoestra awkwardly reached around to remove the hand from his belt, but Coliquin was too quick. In one terrible, swift motion the U.N. secretary flipped Faris D’Hoestra up and over the top of the wall, launching him into the night air.

As he plummeted toward the street below, D’Hoestra shrieked and swung his arms like a child in a nightmare, spinning and doing horrible somersaults on the long ride down.

Coliquin watched until he was sure the body had hit the pavement. Then he stepped back inside. Deter Von Gunter was smoking a cigarette, leaning back in the chair with his legs crossed. He blew out a thin column of white smoke and asked, “That wasn’t really a U.N. charter you stuffed in his pocket, I take it?”

“No,” Coliquin said, “it was his suicide note.”

If his dear departed lover had been in the room, Coliquin would have lifted an eyebrow and instructed her, “That’s how it’s done.”

But he turned to Von Gunter instead. “We have unfinished business. You need to have your World Builders group decide its direction now.”

Deter Von Gunter tapped the end of his cigarette out in the crystal ashtray and stood up. “Not necessary. We’ve already voted.” Von Gunter lowered his head to Coliquin’s left hand and delicately kissed his ring.

John Gallagher swept into Ben Boling’s hospital room and spread his arms wide when he saw the FBI agent in bed. “My hero!”

Boling gave a head nod. “Hey, Gallagher.”

“Sorry I didn’t spring for a bunch of flowers for you. Now that I think of it,” Gallagher said, “I was just at a wedding … I could have swiped some on the way out.”

He strode over to the bedside table and picked up one of the get-well cards. “Gee, a personal card from the director of the Bureau himself. Nice. But I noticed they didn’t include your reprimand slip in it.”

“You know the procedure. They’ll present it to me personally when I get back.”

“Well, anyway, you saved the day.”

Ben Boling painfully moved over a bit in the bed to face Gallagher, grabbing the metal railing as he did. “Not entirely. One dead Secret Service agent. Do you know if Owens was married?”

“Divorced,” Gallagher said. Then his face took on a thoughtful expression. “You know, there was a time when I would have tried to make a joke out of that. Death vs. divorce. Sound cynical?”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Boling said. “We all have ways to cover up the garbage we carry around in this kind of work. Me? I go fishing. You ought to try it.”

Then a look of panic spread over Boling’s face. “Oh, man, I just remembered. My wife’s due here any minute. She’s flying in. I needed to keep my intervention at the convention top secret, so I told her I was on a fishing trip.”

“You were,” Gallagher said, “and you caught a killer — and a half ounce of lead.”

“You know where I took it?” Boling said. “Same place in the lung that Ronald Reagan did. So why did he look so much better than me afterward?”

“Speaking of Washington, why’d they yank you off the Hewbright assignment anyway?”

Boling just shook his head glumly.

“There’s bad stuff afoot,” Gallagher said. “Not just petty infighting, my friend. True rotten, dirty dealing. Starting at the top. Anytime you want to join me in semiretirement, just let me know.”

“Naw. Not me. I’m sticking it out. When something’s gone bad, there’s always a chance to bring back the good.” Then Boling’s eyes widened. “Hey, you want some inside information?”

“You kidding? It’s like Oreo cookie ice cream to me.”

“The hacking of Hewbright’s Allfone. The FBI cyber guys traced it to a Chinese hacker.”

“Old news,” Gallagher said.

“What you don’t know is the name of the hacker’s close associate.”

“You got me drooling. Who?”

“Ho Zhu.”

“I could make a joke out of that too, like the old ‘who’s on first’ routine …”

“This one’s no joke.”

“All right, so what’s so important about Ho Zhu?”

“He’s the deputy secretary of the U.N., just under Coliquin … one of his right-hand men.”

Cal had brought the medical authorization form with him to meet Winnie Corland. She had to be there to collect some personal items of her late husband’s anyway, she said. Now they sat together in the dayroom. The form was on the side table between them, but looking at Winnie and the sadness in her eyes, Cal was sure he would be leaving with it unsigned. She was grief-stricken, and the way Cal saw it, the last thing on her mind was the desire to expose an attempt to interfere with the health of a sitting President. Not now, at least. Winnie was clutching her purse as if she were ready to get up and walk out any minute.

Winnie didn’t talk much. She only mentioned a few details about her husband’s time in the Oval Office and the fact that they didn’t have any children, but Virgil had always wanted a son.

“He followed that terrible incident you were in up in New York at the train station. He admired your father — but thought highly of you too, the way you were able to stay so calm and courageous in the face of such evil. And I think,” she said, and her chin trembled as she said it, “that he would have liked a son like you.”

Surprisingly she got around to talking about President Tulrude, and how she had pressured Virgil to use Dr. Jack Puttner, her own physician. Corland received one shot of something from Puttner
for his transient ischemic heart condition, she couldn’t recall what. Then Virgil’s massive attack took place in the presidential limo after a speech in Virginia.

“I never trusted Tulrude or that Dr. Puttner,” she said.

“How did your husband end up with a vial containing the blood sample that he gave to us?”

Winnie looked away from Cal, seemingly ashamed. “When we first rushed Virgil into the ER in Leesburg, I told the doctor I thought the attack may have been caused by a medical reaction to the drug that Puttner had used. He must have drawn blood immediately. Because later he gave me a plastic medical envelope with the blood sample tube in it. He gave me a funny look when he did and told me to preserve it by keeping it refrigerated. That I ‘might need it as evidence’ later on. He said he suspected some strange things going on — the way that federal officials were handling the medical records. That’s all he would tell me.”

For Cal, the trail seemed to lead not just to Dr. Puttner but to Tulrude as well.

“But now Virgil’s gone,” Winnie said, her voice faltering, “you have no idea how hard this is, talking about this. I just want to forget. All of it.”

A realization hit Cal. If he had done the smart thing while Corland was still alive, and had him sign the medical release back then, he wouldn’t be in the tough spot that he was in now. But it was too late for that.

“I think that’s all for now,” Winnie said and struggled at a smile. “I have to go.”

“I understand,” Cal said, getting up to leave. “Mrs. Corland, I’m so very sorry about your husband. I liked him a lot. I enjoyed spending time with him. I’m sorry if I’ve brought up some bad memories for you.”

Then he turned and walked toward the entrance of the day room.

“Cal,” she said softly. “Please, take this away.” Winnie was holding the medical authorization that he had left on the table.

He complied and trotted up to her and took the form, but Cal
noticed she was putting a pen back into her purse, and he saw her signature at the bottom of the form.

“And don’t worry about my being the one who signed,” she replied and snapped her purse shut. “I have power-of-attorney.”