While Galileo Preys (24 page)

“Are you finished?”

“Are you? When Bob Kellerman gets elected, ladies and gentlemen, the answer will be a resounding yes. Our intelligence community is an embarrassment and Bob Kellerman intends to dismantle the bureaucracy and rebuild a transparent cooperative nonpartisan apparatus. Pay attention to that word ‘nonpartisan.’ Currently our FBI is beholden to the executive branch. The director of our FBI is a political appointee. Bob Kellerman aims to change that, ladies and gentlemen. No more will we have lackeys controlling our intelligence. Leadership will be based not on party affiliation but on merit. Imagine that. We will have people in Washington actually qualified for the jobs they hold.”

This last comment was pointed directly at Tom. Esme watched him breathe deeply. Then, finally, he spoke:

“You’re the one who’s been impeding our investigation.”

“Here we go again, ladies and gentlemen! The ‘blame game’!”

Tom glanced at the small crowd, then back at Paul Ridgely and his smug twinkle-eyed grin. “Kellerman doesn’t even know, does he? You’ve been intercepting all my messages. This maniac is running around murdering people and the one man who can stop him doesn’t even know he’s connected. Why haven’t you told him?”

Now it was Paul’s turn to appear uneasy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. As you admitted, we’ve spoken on the phone. Since you’re all about transparency and access, why don’t you tell the nice people here what we’ve talked about?”

“No one needs their time wasted with conspiracy theories.”

“I think you’re underestimating the public’s curiosity. They do have a right to know, don’t they?”

Paul sipped at his brandy.

Tom turned to the crowd. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but it appears Mr. Ridgely actually does value his privacy. I’m sure he’d appreciate it if you left us alone for a few minutes. Wouldn’t you, Mr. Ridgely?”

Paul sipped at his brandy.

The ladies and gentlemen got the hint, and slowly exited the room, all the while murmuring innuendoes amongst themselves:
conspiracy theory, what conspiracy theory, do you think it’s about who he’s going
to nominate to be his vice president, yes but why would the FBI be involved, I’ll bet it’s a sex scandal, et cetera.

“Well, Tom,” said Esme, “you sure can clear a room.”

Tom replied with a light salute.

Paul cleared his throat, indicated Rafe and Esme. “If you’ll excuse us.”

“Oh, they can stay,” said Tom. “Esme was instrumental in connecting Galileo with your boss. And her husband…well, like you, he needs this lesson in responsibility.”

Rafe took a menacing step forward, but Tom stopped him, and leaned in until they were face-to-face. But then the door to the room opened, and the schoolyard boys backed away from each other. Esme backed away from the door. Paul, in deference, put down his glass of brandy on a side table.

“So here’s the party,” Bob Kellerman said, twirling a cigar between his fingers. “May I join in?”

“H
i,” he said, hand outstretched, “I’m Bob.”

His tuxedo wasn’t the flashiest. His brown hair wasn’t the most neatly combed. But when he walked into the room, there was no question he was a man of calm authority, and everyone wanted to step up their game just to impress him.

“Esme Stuart.” She shook his hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Governor.”

“Rafe Stuart.” He shook his hand. “Thank you for coming to Long Island.”

“Tom Piper.” He shook his hand. “Hello.”

“Tom Piper,” added Paul, “is a special agent with our Federal Bureau of Investigation. He crashed the party armed with some wild accusations.”

Bob wasn’t fazed a bit. “How may we help you, Special Agent Piper?”

“Well, sir, it’s about Galileo.”

The governor folded his arms and leaned in slightly, intent on giving Tom every ounce of his attention. The grave expression on his face said it all: yes, he had
heard about the tragic events of Atlanta, Amarillo, and Santa Fe. By now, every American had heard about—and feared—Galileo.

“We have reason to believe—we have evidence, actually—that Galileo is committing these murders because of you, Governor.”

Bob frowned—his frown seemed to fill his entire malleable face—and he looked to Paul for an explanation.

“This,” Paul pointed, “this is what I mean by ‘wild accusation,’”

“His real name is Henry Booth. He served a stint in the Middle East as a sniper for the CIA but eventually all that violence committed in the name of God got to him and he quit. He was hired by the Unity for a Better Tomorrow to vet you, Governor. In the course of his investigations, Henry Booth discovered something about you that rocked him to the core. That’s when he contacted your organization, begging you to go public with your secret.”

Paul snorted. “I assure you, Mr. Piper, Governor Kellerman received no such contact.”

“No, because you intercepted it and never showed it to him. Just like you intercepted Galileo’s second message back in San Francisco. Maybe you were trying to protect your boss, Mr. Ridgely, but in doing so you endangered lives.”

“What secret?” asked Bob. “What skeleton in my closet drove this madman to kill all these people?”

To that, Tom reached into his pocket and took out a tiny voice recorder.

“Henry played this for the head of the Unity for a Better Tomorrow, Donald Chappell. How Henry got it…well…he did his job.”

Tom pressed Play.

“—right on through November with a strategy which underlines our positive difference. Let the other guy take all the pot shots he wants. He’ll just look desperate.”

Everyone in the room recognized that voice as belonging to Paul Ridgely. Paul, at the sound of his own voice, reached again for his glass of brandy. Perhaps he knew what was coming next.

“But what about the other thing?”

This was a female voice, strident, with a Bostonian lilt.

“Kathryn Hightower,” said Bob, doling out an explanation. “She’s my communications director.” He remained nonplussed, and contemplative.

“Kathryn, I assure you—the religion problem has been sewn up. The only people in the know, other than Bob’s immediate family, are in this room.”

Esme’s jaw dropped open in astonishment, as her mind jumped ahead to the solution. Christ, the answer had been right there all along! She looked to Tom for confirmation. He nodded.

“What if they do enough digging, Paul? We need to be prepared with a response.”

“We prepare a response and I guarantee you it’ll be the response that gets leaked before the actual story and then we’re fucked, Kathryn, you and me and Bob and the whole campaign, because the American public
in their puritanical wisdom want their president to be a man of faith. They love him now—he’s a hero to them now, he’s John fucking Kennedy—but this country will never elect an atheist to the Oval Office.”

Rafe cocked his head. “Wait, what?”

Tom clicked the recorder off.

“That’s a private conversation,” muttered Paul. “It’s obtained illegally and has no standing whatsoever.”

The governor sighed. “Paul, shut up.”

Paul sat down in the closest available armchair and shut up.

“So Donald Chappell knows?” asked Bob. “And he’s still supporting my run?”

“He’s trying to save your soul,” Tom replied.

“So to speak,” added Esme.

Bob nodded, taking it all in.

It was Rafe who broke the silence.

“So Galileo or Henry Booth or whatever his name is, why is he killing all these people? If he’s pissed off at Kellerman for not believing in God, why isn’t he targeting him?”

“That’s the thing,” said Esme. “He’s not pissed off at Kellerman at all.”

“No,” Tom agreed, “he’s not.”

“You said he’s been contacting me?” asked the governor.

“Yes, sir. We believe the first message was probably delivered late last year. Well before Atlanta. Henry was so disenchanted by religion and suddenly here you were, a nonbeliever like him, and you were popular, and you were on your way to the presidency. His first
messages were probably friendly. But when you didn’t respond, when you went ahead and let religious organizations like the Unity for a Better Tomorrow support your campaign, that’s probably when he sent you the quid pro quo. Come out, publicly, proudly, as an atheist…or else.”

“But I never received any…”

All eyes turned to Paul, whose brandy glass was empty.

“I was protecting you!” he explained. “Half of what we get are crazies with their pipe dreams. How was I to know?”

“You knew after Atlanta,” Tom replied. “Because I’m sure Henry was very specific, wasn’t he? As soon as you’d heard what had happened in Atlanta, you knew it was him.”

“And you did nothing,” added Esme.

“If it was in my power to bring those people back to life, I would, but—”

“Paul,” Bob said, suddenly, “I believe you’re talking again. I thought I asked you not to do that.”

The campaign director sank in his armchair and looked very much like a wounded child.

Bob took a deep breath. The weight suddenly on his shoulders seemed to anchor the whole room. “All this time, all those people, and I could have stopped it with a word.”

“You didn’t know,” said Tom.

Bob shrugged. Tom’s words were irrelevant. Because of him, people were dead. Children were dead.

“What can I do?” His voice had diminished to a hoarse whisper. “How can I fix this?”

“At this point, sir, I don’t know if you can.”

Bob nodded thoughtfully. He’d expected that answer.

Once more, it was Rafe who broke the silence:

“For whatever it’s worth, Governor, Mr. Ridgely is right. The people want their president to be a God-fearing, churchgoing man. In our country, in many countries, patriotism is synonymous with piety. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. That’s why you’ve kept this secret all this time. You come out now, and they’ll hate you. You’ll throw away everything you’ve worked toward and someone else will get elected. Mediocrity will inhabit the White House. Do you want to be responsible for that?”

The door to the study opened. It was, of all people, Kathryn Hightower.

“Governor, it’s time for the speech,” she said.

Bob paused for a moment, still deep in thought, and then he turned to Kathryn and nodded. “Thank you, Kathryn. I’ll be right there.”

The world was watching.

Forty-seven cameras were fixed and focused on the podium. Forty-seven cameras, not counting the chic handhelds the guests wielded. By the end of the night, this speech would be available to anyone on the planet with a computer and an Internet connection.

The fascination was understandable. Bob Kellerman was not only the presumptive nominee of his party, but also, based on the latest polls, the all-but-anointed next president of the United States, and although the
popularity of America waxed and waned with each administration, the power remained constant and demanded—if not always earned—respect. And the worldwide prognosis of a Kellerman presidency was one of optimism. He was a populist, but he wasn’t an isolationist. He favored liberalism, true, but he also possessed a Red State inclination toward self-sufficiency. In June, he was scheduled to fly abroad, to Israel and Pakistan and Russia and Egypt, to England and to France, even to long-neglected Venezuela and Brazil. Already, the signs were being painted, in a hundred different languages: We Love Bob.

Not everyone loved Bob. As the governor approached the podium, amidst the customary cheers and applause, he reflected on his enemies. He knew their signs too. “Pro-choice = pro-death.” “Free trade = no jobs.” He read the editorials criticizing his folksy approach to politics. He lacked the Washington experience necessary to deal with a bipartisan Congress. He lacked the international experience necessary to deal with a war. That was why his choice of a vice president was so vital. That was why forty-seven plus cameras were focused and fixed on his face on this night in this place.

They all expected an announcement.

“My friends,” he said, “it gives me great pleasure to see you all here tonight on this beautiful evening by the sea.”

His speech was prepared. It scrolled in large white letters down teleprompters, paired to either side of the crowd. His staff had worked all week on this speech.
They knew how important it was. Consecutive drafts were e-mailed every night to his hotel room in Anaheim, and every night he’d given his notes and made his changes. It was the only communication he’d allowed that week. His cell phone was off. He’d wanted it to be a true vacation. He knew it was the last true vacation his family would be able to enjoy in a long, long time. And he knew that was his fault.

“We come here tonight on the eve of great change. We are on the verge of fulfilling our potential as American citizens and you can see it in the faces of the elderly. You can see it in the faces of the children. They say pride is a sin, but I am here to tell you tonight that I am proud of what the future holds for our country. I am proud of what we can do for our fellow man. I am proud that for the first time in history, freedom has become as vast and limitless as the ocean just beyond that shore.”

It was the empty rhetoric expected of an introduction. If he didn’t offer the platitudes, his critics assailed him. “Well, he only mentioned the word ‘America’ fifty-nine times, so he must be losing his patriotism.” All part of the process.

His kids were back home in Ohio. About now, they would be sitting down for dinner. Maybe they’d have the TV on, but probably not. Daddy was just giving another speech.

“I come to you tonight as a…”

Kathryn Hightower stood off to his left. He could see her out of his peripheral vision. She had been with him since his first mayoral race so many lifetimes ago.

“I come to you tonight as a…”

This was the paragraph where he would segue into his bit about partnership. It was the build-up to the body of the speech. It was the beginning of his announcement of General Archie Phillips to be his running mate. General Phillips was waiting inside the house, just on the other side of the curtained French doors. He was in full dress uniform. He was a good man. He’d been a benevolent, erudite debater during the primaries. But the people hadn’t wanted erudition. They’d wanted homespun. They’d wanted Bob.

The kind of man they could take to church on Sundays.

“I…”

He felt a sideward glance from Kathryn. Loyal, hardworking Kathryn. He wanted to hold her close and kiss her on the forehead and apologize. But that would have to wait. Somewhere in this country, in his country, a man was committing horrific acts of violence in his name. It had to stop.

“Two hundred years ago, when Thomas Jefferson ran for president, there was a great deal of opposition to his campaign. It was the first true bipartisan election, and his opponents realized that since they couldn’t attack his thoughtful policies or his impeccable reputation, they had to resort to different tactics.”

The large white words on the teleprompters scrolled up, then down, then back up again, as the operator tried to locate this part of the speech.

“This was one of the architects of our democracy. This was the man who wrote the Declaration of Inde
pendence. How do you defeat a man like that? You go after his character. And they did. Thomas Jefferson, you see, was a skeptic. He was a scientist, and the scientific pursuit of truth demands evidence, and he looked at the universe and he didn’t believe we had it all figured out. So the muckrakers called him an atheist. The label dogged him all through the campaign, but when the time came to vote for the president of the United States, the American people in their wisdom overwhelmingly chose Jefferson. They put into office a man whose ambitious curiosity helped shape our beloved country.”

Bob could see it now, past the lights, in the faces of the crowd. He had gone off script and they knew it. He could feel the awkward tension vibrating in the air. This wasn’t what they’d expected, and so they weren’t prepared with an appropriate response.

So he rolled the boulder farther down the hill.

“You would think, after that tumultuous election, political operatives would have learned their lesson. A man did not have to be pious to be a patriot. Patriotism is itself a religion, isn’t it? Our country is one grand cathedral and our Constitution is our hymnal. Our sacred commandments come numbered one through ten, only we call them the Bill of Rights. You would think after that tumultuous election, political operatives would have learned their lesson, but they didn’t. Several decades later, they saw another man rise up, a man of ferocious intellect and boundless compassion, and they had no way to stop him so they attacked his personal beliefs. Once again the labels were bandied about.
‘Agnostic.’ One muckraker even called him ‘godless.’ But once again, the wisdom of the American people had been underestimated, and in 1860, they voted this ‘godless agnostic’ to the highest office in the land. Can you imagine what our country would have been like had those small-minded muckrakers won? Can you imagine what our country would have been like had Abraham Lincoln not been elected?”