America Rising (2 page)

Ben Levi turned in his seat and addressed his boss.

“This is how we do it, now and every time after. Two cars, always. Your car will change position at random: back to front, front to back. When we get to the restaurant, we will park directly in front of the entrance and hold there. Michael here”—he indicated the driver—”and I will escort you and Ms. de Silva in. Antwan will park the other car across the street and watch the building, John will take the restaurant’s rear door. I’ll be at the bar, watching the front. When you’re finished dinner, we do it again. But we take a different route home. Anything happens, even smells like it might happen, I give the word and you get down on the floor. You don’t get up until I say. Got that?”

Olivia de Silva opened her mouth to launch one of her trademark whines but something in Ben Levi’s eyes made her reconsider; instead, she fluffed her hair and flopped back in the seat. Men. Ed Bane grinned. “Got it, Moosh,” he said. He looked like he was enjoying the attention. Moises Ben Levi frowned and thought of the hacienda and thirty acres of land he owned in Costa Rica.

* * *

Eldrick Brown padded out of the studio and back to his desk in the “cube farm” of KKLI “Talk-Back Radio.” It was a few minutes after five in the morning and he was tired and ready to go home; he’d been on the air since one, the slot he’d held for the past twenty years. Back then it was just a sop thrown by station management to the black community of the San Francisco Bay Area, but Eldrick Brown made news and got ratings with his defiantly left-wing views, uncanny feel for his audience and mouth that could cut like a scalpel or hack like a meat cleaver.

He took the elevator down to the station lobby and had the relentlessly cheerful security guard at the desk buzz him through to the underground parking garage. Even though four hours of live radio left him drained and weary, he was looking forward to the drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to his Marin County home in his new Jaguar. As he approached the car he heard steps, then a rough voice. “Hey, nigger!”

Eldrick Brown hadn’t heard that word spoken with bad intent in more than twenty years. He stopped and cocked his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it. He couldn’t believe it was happening here. The KKLI garage was guarded, secure, open only to station employees. None of them would be crazy or racist enough to openly slur one of the station’s stars, especially one with his clout and stature. He balled his fists and turned to face the voice; Eldrick Brown never backed down from a fight, either on the air or in the street.

He didn’t have a chance. In an instant, a fist as hard and heavy as a lead weight landed on the side of his face. He could hear his cheekbone crack, feel his mouth fill with blood. Other fists connected with his ear, his kidneys, his groin. But he was already falling to the pavement, losing consciousness. He never felt the boot that broke off a piece of a rib and drove it straight through his heart.

E
arly Monday morning the phone rang in my cluttered home office.

“Josh, it’s Chloe.” I knew that tone of voice well—tired and wired, a combination known to any reporter who’d pulled an all-nighter chasing down a breaking story.

“Jesus, Chloe, it’s four-thirty in San Francisco. You sure are burning the candle.”

Chloe Enders was one of my best friends in the news business. We met in the Mission District covering a triple homicide, me for the San Francisco Trib, she for a local TV station. Despite the usual print-broadcast rivalry, we liked each other immediately, and when we were both laid off by our respective employers, we banded together with a couple dozen other turned-loose scribes in several big cities to start Public Interest, a nonprofit investigative journalism service—a sort of Huffington Post with fangs—that dug up the dirt that most print, broadcast and online outlets had neither the funds nor desire to uncover. We sometimes partnered with other media, and posted on our own website too, embarrassing more than a couple of major news outfits by exposing scandals in their own back yards. If Chloe Enders was at her desk before the sun came up, the excrement was about to hit the forced-air induction system.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Josh. But I’ve got bad news.”

Great. I already felt like flypaper to bad news.

“Eldrick Brown is dead.”

“Ahhh, shit, Chloe.”

I knew Eldrick well and I liked him a lot. I’d first met him at a divey Mission District bar favored by media types, and though our schedules were typically crazy, we made it a point to get together for drinks, gossip and general bitching at least a couple of times a month. He was a good friend when Caroline was sick, and after we moved to the Keys he kept in touch via email and the occasional phone call. Eldrick Brown was smart, tough and fearless. The media universe was a lesser place without him.

“What happened?”

“He was beaten to death. In ‘LI’s garage as he was going home after his show.”

“Are you
kidding?!”
I was stunned, incredulous. “Jesus Christ! How the hell did that happen?”

“Surprised the guard at the gate. Shot him. Three males. They ambushed Eldrick and just worked him over. The guard’s in critical condition but he managed to give the cops a partial license plate. CHP stopped them on 101 on their way to the airport. They were speeding. Doing eighty in a fifty-five zone. Dumbshits. The chippies were about to let them go when the BOLO came through.

“Here’s where it really gets interesting, though. My sources in the cop shop tell me two of them are hired muscle from L.A. But the other one is from your neck of the woods. Armando Gutierrez. Cuban, thirty-three years old, six-two, two-fifty. South Beach address. He’s been in the system. A couple of assaults, one looks like a road rage. A B&E. Domestic disputes, one of which ended in a kidnapping charge. But no convictions, everything dropped. No one wants to beef on this guy. He doesn’t seem like any kind of real player but still, it’s goddam odd. Why is a Miami gangsta coming all the way to San Francisco to stomp a sixty-two-year-old talk show host?”

“Fuck if I know, Chloe. There are still a few groups of Cuban Castrophobes around here who might want to take out the Bay of Pigs on “commies” and lefties but they’re pretty much relics now. The younger generation, conservative or not, doesn’t go in for that kind of stupidity. Cuba is a place they’ve heard about, not a reason for murder. But you’re right, Gutierrez being there is goddam odd, and definitely worth looking into.

“Speaking of which, I’m working another one here; you’ll love it. Seems some of our esteemed public servants in Tallahassee like to come down to the Keys once a year to do the wild thing with a bunch of hookers and some serious pharmaceuticals. I got a tip on when and where, and I’m setting up a stakeout. That should stir up some major shit, no? Video of a houseful of pompous, self-righteous politicians doped to the gills getting their dicks sucked at an orgy pad. I can’t wait to see that one go live.”

Chloe could only laugh; I could almost see her shaking her head. “What is it with you people in Florida anyway? Sun bake your brains? Hurricanes scramble your senses? Something in the water? You people give corruption a bad name.”

I guess I’d grown used to it.

“Acts of outrageous stupidity and criminal intent,” I said. “It’s what we’re best at. I’ll be in touch, Chloe.”

* * *

The Lincoln Town Car bearing U.S. Senator Kip Richardson gleamed like a shiny black stone as it crept through the clotted maze of Manhattan streets to a sleek white granite and limestone-faced tower on West 56
^th
Street. More than two decades in the Senate, half of that a member of the powerful and prestigious Banking Committee, the New York Democrat still savored the chairmanship he attained last year with the election of fellow Democrat Nancy Elias, the first woman to attain the Oval Office.

He wasn’t savoring much today, though, not even the excellent dinner and white Burgundy he’d consumed last night, just a few hours before boarding a Gulfstream G500 to fly to New York on the summons—and it was a summons, not a request—to meet with Meyer Global Financial Inc.’s chairman and CEO Frank Bernabe.

What bothered him, besides the curtness of the order and its humiliating implication, was the purpose of this hastily arranged meeting. He didn’t know what it was. Since the day his parents divorced when he was twelve years old, Kip Richardson liked to be in control, and the one thing you were not when you dealt with Frank Bernabe was in control. The man’s obsession with dominating his environment and his ruthlessness in doing so were legendary. He personally approved even the paper clips used in every one of his worldwide offices, and was said to have fired an executive who used an unauthorized kind.

He brought that same domineering managerial style, not to mention personal and corporate resources estimated at more than one trillion dollars, to the political side of Meyer Global’s operation. Kip Richardson owed his career and chairmanship to Frank Bernabe’s financial support and influence, and he had placed so many former executives in the Elias administration, from the vice-president on down, that Washington insiders had taken to referring to the famously strong-willed Elias as “President Bernabe’s press secretary.”

They arrived at the sleek I.M. Pei-designed tower where Bernabe kept the top-floor penthouse, one of two Manhattan penthouses registered to Meyer Global, in addition to personal residences in the Hamptons, Palm Springs and Monaco. The Town Car dipped into an underground garage and parked. Without speaking, the driver carded Richardson into a small foyer sealed with heavily smoked glass, carded him into a private elevator, then watched the numbers above it blink until it reached the 17
^th
floor. The elevator doors opened and Kip Richardson found himself staring at a stunning young Asian woman in a gray silk pantsuit.

“Good morning, Senator,” Wei Lee said, taking his overcoat and handing it to a houseboy. “Mr. Bernabe is in his study. Please follow me.”

Richardson had never been inside Frank Bernabe’s opulent aerie. before. He gaped at the extraordinary apartment with its severely contemporary décor, millions of dollars worth of modern art and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Central Park. Rumor had it Bernabe bought all three of the building’s penthouses and combined them into one so there would be no question who ruled this particular gold-plated roost.

Wei Lee opened the study door and motioned the senator to go in. Frank Bernabe was seated behind a mammoth stainless steel and glass desk, engrossed in something scrolling down on his smartphone. He was a compact man, not much bigger than his Asian majordomo, but he filled out his dark Saville Row suit so much it appeared to be bursting at the seams, even though it had been hand-tailored to his frame with surgical precision. With a shining bullet of a shaven head, pugnacious jaw, unblinking black eyes and aggressive posture, he resembled a tank rolling implacably forward, trampling anything in its path.

He tapped the smartphone’s screen while Kip Richardson fidgeted nervously, sweat dampening the collar and armpits of his Turnbull & Asser shirt. One more tap and Frank Bernabe looked up as if he’d just noticed he had a visitor.

“Ah, Kip. Good of you to come on such short notice.”

He made no motion to sit so Richardson stood, face reddening, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He tried to cover this further humiliation by putting on his best vote-hounding voice and booming, “Good to see you too, Mr. Bernabe.”

It was
always
“Mister Bernabe.” No one addressed Frank Bernabe as “Frank.” Consensus was the gates of hell would swing open and swallow the first person who dared. Finally deciding the senator had suffered enough, Meyer Global’s boss nodded at a low-slung Barcelona chair opposite the desk. Kip Richardson sat.

“I’m very disappointed in you, Kip. Very disappointed,” he said without preamble. “You were supposed to keep that bill”—S.4220, aka the Financial Reform and Stability Act—”bottled up in committee. Then you assured me you would work with your colleagues on the other side of the aisle to keep it from coming to a vote. Then you assured me it didn’t have the votes to pass. Your assurances, frankly, weren’t worth shit.”

Kip Richardson swallowed and hoped the sweat on his upper lip wasn’t showing; the back of his shirt was wet and stuck to his skin as if glued.

“Do you realize what effects this could have on our business here?” Bernabe demanded, allowing a flash of anger to show. “To our economic recovery? Do you have any idea?”

“Uh, yes, Mr. Bernabe, I do,” Richardson said. “I do indeed. But you have to understand, the mood of the country is terrible. People are angry—damn angry, if you’ll pardon my French. They hate us, all of us, in Washington and on Wall Street. Why, last district meeting, people actually threw rocks at my car—not left-wing thugs and vandals but good, solid, blue-collar Democrats, people who have supported me for years.

“We have to do something to calm them down. I know you despise government meddling in your affairs and I agree; capitalism and free markets are what made this country great. But believe me, there’s less here than meets the eye. My colleagues and I will oppose the appointment of anyone who doesn’t understand your position to any regulatory post, I guarantee you that. And I’ve been assured by that you’ll have veto power over any appointments that are sent up.