Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (17 page)

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I shall organise a ticket for you on the next available flight. You are in Brisbane yes? And travelling incognito? As Ms Julianne Black?’

‘Julia. For now,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably need another ID in a couple of days. It’s Cesky, if you remember him, from Acapulco. The guy we didn’t let on the boat. The vengeful prick just won’t give it up. He’s had a couple of goes at both the Rhino and me back Stateside. And I think he’s found us over here now, too.’

‘I see,’ said Shah, sounding preoccupied. ‘It is settled, then,’ he said. ‘I shall organise you transport as soon as possible.’

‘I need to get to the Rhino as quickly as possible, too,’ she said. ‘He’s probably in danger. And you said you have had some trouble?’

‘Some, yes. I do not wish to be rude, Miss Julianne, but I would like to address these problems with dispatch. If you remain at your hotel I will send through details of your flights when they are booked.’

‘And the Rhino?’

‘He is working with one of the trawler companies up here. He may be out on the water, I do not know,’ said Shah. ‘But I shall have my men check for him, and when I send through your travel details I will also include some contacts for him. Places you might look when you get into town. I assume you’ll want to start straight away.’

‘I will,’ said Julianne. ‘I’ve had enough of this shit.’

James Kipper was grumpy. Jed could see he was grumpy as soon as he and Marilyn were admitted to the President’s private quarters – simply because he was in the process of getting dressed. Just his dinner jacket and black bow tie, known by presidential decree as ‘the Asphyxiator’, to go. He’d have started complaining as soon as he pulled his pants on, and stepped it up while trying to get the cummerbund to sit properly around his nonexistent waist. The performance would soon be reaching a crescendo of mumbling and grumbling about ‘these stupid monkey clothes’ while Barb attempted to do up the Asphyxiator. The President of the United States was nothing if not consistent. As was his wife. She sported the same furiously furrowed brow that Culver recognised from any number of these occasions over the past couple of years.

‘He was trying to get away with wearing a clip-on. Can you imagine that, Jed?’

‘All too easily,’ he snorted. ‘I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tried turning up in a Hawaiian shirt or with a motorised bow tie that could spin like a propeller.’

‘Hey, I am the President, you know, fella,’ Kip protested. ‘And that sounds mighty like sedition talk to me. Don’t make me call the Secret Service.’

‘Just shut up and let me finish this,’ his wife scolded as she fussed some more with the Asphyxiator. ‘I can’t do this while you’re flapping your gums around.’

‘I love what you’ve done with your hair, Babs,’ said Marilyn. It was an artful attempt to push the conversation away from Kipper’s deep-seated aversion to dressing like a grown-up and onto a topic with which Jed’s wife was familiar. One in which she was frighteningly overqualified, in fact.

‘Oh, this?’ The First Lady blew a freshly cut fringe of hair back out of her eyes. ‘It was getting too long. I had to do something.’

She finished with her husband’s bow tie and banished him to the walk-in closet for his jacket. The two women fell into conversation as Culver joined his boss.

‘I know you hate these things, Kip,’ he said, as always, getting his attention immediately with the informal manner of address. ‘But it’s as much a part of your job as dealing with budgets, railroads and reconstruction, and more a part of your job than worrying about snow blowers and powerlines around the city like you were this afternoon.’

‘Jesus, Jed, did Barbara word you up before you got here? Because I’ve been getting slammed by her for the same thing all evening.’

The Chief of Staff helped him get his arms into the dinner jacket and even tugged at the lapels a couple of times to make it sit properly on Kip’s shoulders.

‘That’s because she’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re not the city engineer anymore. You’re the President. City engineers worry about snowstorms. Presidents worry about re-election.’

Kipper frowned. ‘I thought I was supposed to worry about a lot more than that.’

‘It’s all moot if you don’t get re-elected. And that’s not going to happen unless you campaign properly. And you cannot campaign properly without money. So that’s what tonight is about – raising money, to get you back into office, so you can do your job, clearing roads, rebuilding railways and pissing off the Greens by opening up a nasty new power plant somewhere. It’s all good. But none of it is going to happen if you don’t get the votes.’

Kipper coughed out a short, humourless laugh. ‘I think all those things will happen whether I get re-elected or not, Jed. Some things aren’t political. They just have to happen.’

‘Really? Seriously? You actually live inside that gingerbread house?’ Culver asked in a gentle voice. ‘You think Sandra Harvey would let the French build that shiny new pebble bed reactor you’re so keen on? You think Blackstone would run your settlement program completely blind to race, colour or creed? You happy with the way he’s virtually outlawed labour unions down there in Texas?’

He had him, of course, which didn’t improve Kip’s mood. He hated being pushed into a corner. But at least when you got him there, he had the good grace to stay put.

‘I suppose so,’ he sighed. ‘Well, are we going to get this done?’

They exited the large closet and rejoined their wives, who had moved on from complementing each other’s outfits to discussing the children. Marilyn had never had any of her own, but she had been stepmother to Melanie and Roger for long enough to have earned her spurs. Jed pursed his lips at the incongruity of it all, the banality of everyday life within the insanely pressurised environment of supreme executive power. Even if that power was a dim shadow of its former greatness.

A soft knock at the door, and the protocol chief, Allan Horbach, admitted himself after a greeting from Barbara.

‘Time for cocktails,’ he announced.

‘Well, at least there’s that,’ said Kipper in a funereal tone. But in fact, there wasn’t, not for him.

The four of them walked the short distance to the reception room, where the buzz of conversation grew noticeably louder with their arrival. Jed nodded in satisfaction. All of the big chequebooks were here: Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Costco, Cesky Enterprises, T-Mobile, the biotechs. All manoeuvring for access to the President, who would need to keep his head straight while he talked to them. After being announced to the room by Horbach, both Jed and Kip were handed champagne flutes by the White House head of protocol. On Culver’s instructions, both contained sparkling apple juice.

‘But I don’t even like champagne,’ Kipper muttered out of the side of his mouth.

‘Then you’ll be fine,’ replied his Chief of Staff, without sympathy. ‘Because you’re not getting any.’ He could’ve murdered a whiskey sour himself, but he had learned as a baby lawyer that drinking was best done after work, not during, and this was definitely work.

‘Mr President!’

Really. Hard. Work.

Henry Cesky, all bulk and bravado, had elbowed his way through the crowd to claim pole position in the race for Kipper’s attention. His shoulders moved around under the expensive fabric of his dinner jacket like barrels loose on the deck of a schooner.

‘Hey, Henry,’ said Kip, pleasantly enough, while Culver went into a full-throttle, double-grip handshake, with shoulder punching and a bit of locker-room rough-housing thrown in. He could pull it off, having been a college wrestler. Kip couldn’t. And Cesky was one of those guys who didn’t just like to cultivate a rough-handed, working-stiff-made-good image. He was the real thing. Even if he hadn’t always done good to make good, and even if that roughness of character sometimes made him a risky choice at events like this. He was entirely capable of getting liquored up and throwing a punch at someone, perhaps a business rival or somebody who looked askance at his wife. Even the Secretary of the Treasury, if he was in a bad mood after filing his taxes. Rough, unkempt black hair and a twice-broken nose added to the impression that Henry had spent decades in a boxing ring, never knowing when to give up.

It was a wonder Kipper and he didn’t get along better. After all, it was Cesky putting a couple of hundred of his workmen onto the street, armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, that had added enough muscle to the popular uprising against Blackstone to see the fascist little prick tipped off his throne back in April ’03. But Kip, like Marilyn, just didn’t like the man. He hid it well enough, though. And that’s all Jed could ask. Henry Cesky was a fucking cash cow.

The reception room at Dearborn House wasn’t so crowded that people were being jostled – unless they’d been in Cesky’s way when he moved across the room to see Kipper. But it was crowded enough that people were beginning to raise their voices to be heard over each other. A string quartet borrowed from the city’s Symphony Orchestra kept it light with a bit of Vivaldi, while waiters circulated with more food than drinks. For now.

‘How’s business, Henry?’ the President asked. ‘I was in KC a couple of weeks ago with Barney. He said the power grid over there was working almost perfectly now, thanks to your guys and the work they did at the plant.’

Brooklyn-based before the Wave, and Polish-born long before that, Cesky was a short but powerfully built man. You could see him levitating an inch or two with the compliment.

‘That’s good to hear, Mr President,’ he roared back, altogether too loudly.

Kip’s Secret Service detail momentarily switched their attention from scanning the room to focus in on the loudmouth. As soon as they saw it was Cesky, however, their interest evaporated.

‘Anything my guys can do to help, we’re there,’ the construction tsar added, raising his glass in salute.

‘And I’m sure anything the government can do to help one of our biggest employers and taxpayers,’ said Jed, ‘well, I’m sure we’ll be there, too.’

Cesky snagged a beer from a passing waiter, causing the President’s face to crumple in naked envy. He sipped at his sparkling apple juice with no pleasure at all.

‘Well, on that, I gotta tell you, Mr President – Kip – I’m looking forward to this tax review you got going on. And I’m hoping your people are going to listen to my idea about one simple flat rate that everyone pays. No deductions. No paperwork. No fucking around with any of that stuff. We just hand over, say, twenty per cent. And the government gets off our backs. What do you say?’

‘I’d say it sounds like the sort of idea I would’ve come up with when I had an honest job,’ replied Kipper, giving Cesky cause to float another inch off the carpet. ‘But like all my best ideas, Henry, I bet yours would hit the brick wall of the bureaucracy and splatter like an egg.’

Culver had to hand it to Kip. He really knew how to tell a guy what he wanted to hear while he let him down at the same time. Of course, it was always possible that he agreed with Cesky’s crazy flat-tax idea – in which case, it was probably a good thing he assumed it would splatter when tossed against the proverbial wall.
Oh, if only funding a crippled government at the end of the world was as simple as passing the hat round
, thought Jed. Intending to move his boss through the room, he was already scanning the crowd looking for the next donor when Cesky surprised him.

‘You know, Kip,’ the big man said, feeling perfectly comfortable addressing the President as though he was speaking to some beer buddy, ‘if you’d just make that bastard down in Texas pay his way, you could probably afford a decent tax package. Okay, maybe not
my
idea. I know people are always gonna be suspicious of a guy with too much money saying he should pay less tax, but as long as that asshole is holding out on the rest of the country, you can’t get nothing done. That’s why I don’t push back too hard when my invoices don’t get paid right away by the Treasury. Because I know that rat fuck is holding out on you!’

The Secret Service were watching again, but Kip had switched from polite interest to genuine engagement with the construction magnate. Cesky had found one of the President’s hot-button issues. He took a gulp from the champagne flute full of apple juice as if he’d forgotten it wasn’t a real drink.

‘I fucking tell you, Henry, I wish I had a few more guys like you working for me,’ said Kipper. ‘This is exactly what I’ve been saying for over a year. Do you know how many of my problems would go away if that guy would just pay his bills?’

And just like that, the energy between them shifted and they suddenly looked like old beer buddies after all, intent on saving the world with a couple of six-packs and a bunch of f-bombs. But Jed Culver didn’t like the way this was going. He could almost see Kip agreeing to road-trip down to Texas in Cesky’s pick-up, with a keg on the seat between them and an ass-kicking for Governor Blackstone in the offing. Not that the idea didn’t appeal, on a deeply undergraduate level, but a large part of his job involved protecting Kip from his often naïve enthusiasm.

Jed was just about to step in and break up the bromance when the First Lady appeared with Marilyn and insisted that the President come over and meet a real-live Hollywood star, Sigourney Weaver. Ms Weaver had been spared the fate of so many of her colleagues by happening to be overseas promoting some long-forgotten kid’s film with Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf when Brad and Clint and Arnie and Angelina were all reduced to pink mud.

‘Really?’ Cesky said, instantly losing interest in tax policy and federal–state relations. ‘I loved those
Alien
films. And I heard she was going to be in the new one, with those predators they had in that old Schwarzenegger movie. How cool would that be? Although, you know, it’s the Brits making it. So it’ll probably be shit.’

‘You liked those films? I
loved
those fucking films, man!’ enthused Kipper, forgetting himself in his surprise that he’d found more common ground with the construction magnate. ‘Especially the second one, with the Marines. It was the only one where you felt like the good guys actually had a chance. You know, right up until they got eaten.’

Here was a conversation James Kipper could really get lost in. But the ladies did Jed’s job for him, Marilyn in particular. The third Mrs Culver let the businessman have a couple of thousand watts of eyes, tits and teeth, before skilfully prising the President away and hurrying him off through the crowd, to safety, in a fashion that would’ve done his Secret Service detail proud.

‘I’ll tell Sigourney you’re a big fan, Henry,’ said Marilyn. ‘Come and meet her later. But I have to introduce Kip first, or that dreadful protocol Nazi will have kittens. Come on, Mr President.’

Culver and Cesky were left on their own.

‘Jeez, women eh?’ sighed Cesky, still a little dazed from Marilyn’s performance.

‘Henry, I don’t know how we’ve managed to keep them in their place for six thousand years.’

Cesky rewarded that crack with a raucous laugh. He threw down the rest of his beer just in time to swap it for another, which came floating past on a tray.

‘Yeah, women – can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, unless you wanna go gay or something! But all joking aside, Jed,’ he said, ‘I’m fucking serious about this Blackstone. The day is coming when you’re gonna have to crack him upside the head. Knock him down so hard he doesn’t get back up again. Did you know that bastard has me blacklisted down there? All of that construction and salvage and clearance work he’s got going on, and I can’t get a taste of it. He’s a vengeful cocksucker, I tell you.’