America Rising (23 page)

The president’s lips tightened again and he feared another explosion, but she merely sighed and said bitterly, “I offered Joe Secret Service protection, more than once. Told him he was a fool for not taking it. But he had to hire his own people. You know Joe, he’s always smarter than everyone else. Now the arrogant bastard has got us all in deep shit.” She grimaced and waved the thought away. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on.”

Ray Carmody’s voice was still pained. “The rest was easy. In all the panic the kidnappers got Joe out of the hotel and into his vehicle. He has two SUVs, armored, with GPS locators. They blocked the GPS and must have overpowered the drivers—or maybe they were in on it. . . And then they just disappeared.”

He stopped and looked sorrowfully at Nancy Elias.

“We don’t know where they are, where Joe is. We haven’t found the drivers or the SUVs. The kidnappers must have ditched them before they got far so we have to assume they now have other vehicles. We’ve received no communications, no ransom note, no demands. Local PD and FBI on-scene have found nothing; I’ve already dispatched a strike force to San Francisco and will monitor the investigation personally.”

He stopped and squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. Dread like a fever suffused Nancy Elias’s body.

“Who did it, Ray?” she said softly. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Ray Carmody looked like he wanted to throw up.

“They found a card,” he said simply. “On one of the bodyguards. The same one. FEAR.”

The stillness in the room lasted a long time.

“God help us,” the president said, barely above a whisper. The room went still again. Finally she said, “How much does the media know? Can we keep a lid on it?”

“So far we’re good,” Ray Carmody said, his voice rising with a scintilla of hope. “The official line is the vice president was evacuated uninjured from the scene of an attempted assassination and is secure in an undisclosed location. There are rumors, of course, but I’ve already reached out to the heads of the media companies and asked them to rein in their people in the interest of national security. Local law enforcement has been instructed not to comment or release any information; the first uniforms on the scene have already been spoken to and sequestered.”

“That’s good. I’ll reach out myself, just to make sure they understand the stakes here. But, why, Ray? Why Joe? What do they want with him?”

“I don’t know,” Ray Carmody answered, running through the possibilities in his head. “If they wanted to kill him, he’d be dead already. If they took him for ransom, we’d have already heard from them. Joe does have a lot of enemies, both here and overseas. I suppose they could have been working for one group or another, but I don’t believe that either.

“The only thing that makes sense, frankly, Nancy, scares the bejesus out of me. They want to know what he knows. All those years in business, politics, two terms in the White House. . . Joe knows damn near everything. What deals were cut and with who, who calls the shots, who doesn’t, who gets paid, where all the bodies are buried.” He laughed harshly, a sound with neither wit nor humor. “Figuratively
and
literally. Hell, he’s shoveled dirt over a lot of them.” Then, glancing up at Nancy Elias. “Figuratively, of course.”

The president sat thinking. Ray Carmody waited.

After a time she said, “And when they know what Joe knows?”

“Those FEAR people? They’ll release it,” Ray Carmody said miserably. “They’ll release everything. Put it online. Make copies on discs and hard drives and Xerox machines and send them to every news organization, blogger and crackpot liberal group on the planet. Expose everything. Expose all of us.

“The only way to stop them is to find Joe before he breaks, and the odds are aren’t with us. These people are too good, too professional. They’ve been at this for months and we still don’t even know who they are. And we both know they won’t cut a deal. So all we can do is try to contain it when it happens and hope too much shit doesn’t fly off the fan. We’ll keep trying to find them, of course. Take them all out. Joe, too, if need be. But as your chief of staff—your friend, Nancy—I’m telling you to prepare for the worst. Starting now.”

Ray Carmody stared at his wingtips and said mournfully, “I’m sorry, Madam President.”

Nancy Elias sat with her hands folded, her mind a million miles away. “I am too, Ray,” she said. Then more briskly, “Work up a plan and get it to me ASAP.” She reached for the telephone. “I think I’d better call Frank.”

* * *

Everyone came to the party—AnnaLynn, Ian and the rest of the SayNo crew. All of my friends and drinking buddies. Robert too. That was a surprise; he was traveling so much nowadays I hardly ever saw him. I cooked that hogfish dinner I’d promised, set out bowls of Key West pinks with spicy cocktail sauce and a couple of store-bought Key lime pies. Washed them all down with a couple cases of beer and half a case of sturdy White Bordeaux.

In my role as attentive host, grillmaster and party facilitator I didn’t get much chance to talk to AnnaLynn. In fact, I’d hardly talked to her at all since she came to the Keys. But she seemed to be having a good time, which made me happy. When she announced after dinner that she and her staff were leaving for New Orleans the next day I felt a few pangs but, in truth, I was a little relieved too.

Around midnight the party started breaking up, everyone drifting off until it was just AnnaLynn and me. It was an awkward moment but I didn’t want to leave it like that so we walked across the street to the beach, grabbed a couple of chairs and studied the sky and water until the awkwardness just seemed to melt away. At length she broached the subject I probably should have brought up myself.

“Robert told me about Carolyn,” she said. “I’m very sorry. It must have been hard for you.”

“It was,” I said. “It still is. But I deal with it.”

We were silent for another moment, then she said, “I want to thank you again for everything you’ve done. For New Orleans. For this. You didn’t have to do any of it.”

I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. Then AnnaLynn stood up and I started to stand too but she put her hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down.

“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “It will be a long day tomorrow. But I’m honored you let me share this place with you. It is beautiful.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Take care of yourself, Josh Henson.”

I listened to her footsteps crunch in the sand, heard the engine start up, its low rumble crest and then fade away as the van rolled up the street. Then it was just me and the sky and the sand and the Sound. They were pretty good companions too.

* * *

In the end, Joe Josephson talked.

He talked for eighteen straight hours, every word and gesture recorded, every deal, betrayal, lie, bribe and cynical manipulation explained in Technicolor detail. When it was over both the former vice president and his interrogator were exhausted, their emotions raw as if sandpapered.

It had taken less than a day to convince Joe Josephson to sing like Maria Callas, though he had no sense of day or night or the actual passage of time. At some point after that first conversation the pass-through on the cell door opened and a plastic tray bearing a sandwich, bowl of soup, bag of potato chips and large bottle of water was shoved into the room. The sight and smell of food had an explosive effect on his appetite. He hadn’t eaten since his speech in San Francisco, and quickly polished off the simple meal. Then he lay back down on the bed and began plotting a strategy for when his captor’s voice returned.

It didn’t, though.

Instead what returned was a warm, tingly, drowsy feeling, the same feeling he vaguely remembered in the back of his SUV. His nerves seized with fear. He tried to move, to sit up but his limbs refused to obey. Then that warm, tingly, drowsy feeling took over and he felt consciousness leave him like a pinpoint of light vanishing into darkness.

How long he stayed in that dark place he didn’t know. He only knew that as awareness began to slowly seep into his brain he was in a very different place than before. His head pounded, something cold and hard jabbed him in the side, his mouth was filled with something firm yet pliable that hurt against his gums.

That was odd too. The air he was breathing was fresh and clean, yet the air on his skin was cold and clammy, so thick with moisture he felt he could cup it in his hands. But he couldn’t move his hands. His feet either. His eyes blinked open. Nothing but black. He couldn’t see.

God help me! I can’t see!

Panic drove the last vestiges of Diprivan from his system. He screamed and thrashed wildly, scraped patches of flesh off his elbows and knees. He tried to rise and banged his head hard on a rough, unyielding surface. Terror flowed through his veins like an evil poison.

“I did say we would talk again, Joe.”

It was that preternaturally calm voice again.

But Joe Josephson didn’t hear. He screamed into the mouthpiece, slashing his gums, almost choking on his own spittle. Thrashed violently. Banged his head. Screamed and thrashed some more.

Only silence.

Eventually, his panic spent itself, his screams and gyrations gave way to a feeble, trembling whimper.

“Are you ready to talk now, Joe?” The voice was coming to him through a tiny receiver in his ear. “Let me explain your situation to you. You have, to put it bluntly, been buried alive. I do apologize for the crudeness of your containment vessel. Fine carpentry is not among my skills. You and your, shall we say, coffin, are ten feet below the floor of the room you were just in. Which itself is already below ground.

“The thing sticking you in the side is a small oxygen tank. It has enough air for about half an hour, less if you keep flailing about like that. You are breathing, of course, through a mouthpiece connected to the tank. When those thirty minutes are up, you won’t be breathing at all, and my colleagues and I will pour a large amount of dirt and concrete over you and leave you there for however long it takes you to die. And decompose and be eaten by worms and so on. So I repeat my question, Joe. Are you ready to talk? Kick your. . . receptacle three times if you do.”

Joe Josephson kicked. God, how he kicked.

“Excellent,” the voice said. “Things are looking up already. Now, my second question is: Do you remember our earlier conversation? The one where I asked you to, as they say, ‘spill the beans’ on all the rotten things you’ve done, give up all your filthy little secrets. If you remember that conversation, give me another three kicks.”

Joe Josephson kicked as if his life depended on it.

“Very good. So if I let you out we’ll talk about all that. You will answer every question I ask, tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you go back in the box and die a slow, painful, suffocating death? Answer carefully. You won’t get a second chance. Three more kicks if you agree.”

Joe Josephson kicked.

Within minutes he felt his wooden coffin lift, heard the top pried off, felt a life-saving rush of fresh air on his face, hands hoisting him up, carrying him off, depositing him on the bed in his makeshift plywood jail cell, which now had the aura of the presidential suite at a five-star hotel. He heard the wooden door close, the lock click shut. He curled up on the bed and clutched at the pillow as if it was the very life itself that had come so close to being taken from him.

A
battered red pickup truck rolled slowly down St. Claude Avenue, a main thoroughfare splitting New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. It was a sunny spring day with a hint of chill in the air. The streets were full of cars, children skipped along the sidewalks, small clots of men clustered in front of liquor stores or on the porches of modest houses.

After all these years the effects of Hurricane Katrina were still on painful and unavoidable display. Boarded-up homes and businesses shared space on the same block with meticulously repaired and renovated buildings, with those still in reclamation and those, like their residents, that were barely hanging on.

That the devastation of one of America’s iconic cities no longer elicited outrage or even attention made the driver’s ears burn with a simmering anger. But he let it go and turned off on a side street. He was looking for a home that spoke to him, a place where he could stay for awhile and use his skills and make new friends and then, as always, move on.

He found it on a street barely wide enough to let two cars pass. It was a long, narrow, wood-frame home—”shotgun,” in the vernacular—because a slug fired from the front door would fly unimpeded down the length of the home’s hallway and exit at the rear. The doors and windows were boarded up. The façade, which might have once been white, was defiled by a thin, brown line that reached almost to the sagging roof. That’s how high the noxious mix of water and sewage and toxic waste from the overflowing Industrial Canal had risen. On the plywood slab covering what used to be the front door was an X spray-painted in neon orange even now as common in the Ninth Ward as drunken tourists on Bourbon Street.