Apache Dawn: Book I of the Wildfire Saga (4 page)

“But—wait just a minute,” the Vice President said, painfully aware that fear had crept into his voice.
 
“We agreed you’d leave my family out of this!”

“That was before you decided to change the terms of our agreement.
 
Do you, or do you not have the—how do I say it?
 
Ah, yes, the testicular fortitude—to continue?
 
Answer the question and roll the dice, Harry.”

The line went dead with a soft beep.

“Dammit!” he growled and slammed the secure-link cell phone down on the wide executive desk. The polished glossy surface of the desk occupied most of his austere office at the Naval Observatory.
 
He leaned back in the plush leather chair and steepled his fingers, lost in thought.
 
It was hard to focus.
 

The proposition put forward by the man he knew only as “Reginald”—and the Vice President had serious doubts that was the young man’s real name—was as sweeping and terrifying as it was tempting.
 

He drummed his manicured fingers on the desk that had been used for close to 50 years by his predecessors. It was not nearly as nice nor as famous as its bigger, older, more prestigious cousin in the Oval Office.
 
He frowned.
 
That was a fact he regretted every time he sat down to work. But then again, he was the Vice President.
 
Break glass in case of emergency.
 

Harold James Barron, Esquire, had spent his entire adult life gaining entrance and ingratiating himself into the tattered American political landscape.
 
He had clawed his way in as an outsider during the heady days of his youth when big government had stretched itself too far and rode the coattails of the progressive movement into office. First at the state level, then the national.
 
At 38, he was the second youngest Vice President to serve the office and was all set to get the nod to be President after faithfully serving as the understudy.
 

After all, the President had been pretty popular in the first few years of the first term.
 
He had been swept into office on promises that most people knew he couldn’t keep, but they had liked him anyway. The electorate had given him and his dashing young running mate a chance to reform the out of control government the current generation of voters had inherited.

Then the reality of Washington politics had set in.
 
The lobbyists arrived, toting bags of money, promises, loans, cars, vacations, plane trips, anything and everything they could get their hands on to bribe the new powers-that-be to lean one way or the other on certain issues.
 
The good old boy network of incumbency began to entwine the new-blood Administration and suddenly all those aspirations and promises seemed like just so many words. But still he had held out−he had been the shining beacon of hope and reform the people so desperately wanted.

It had taken two whole years for him to fall from his lofty ideals into the mire and filth that was the status-quo of national politics.
 
Part of him would forever be ashamed of that fact.
 
The other part reveled in the perks while trying to remain proud that he had lasted as long as he had.
 
His fall bean one…

One night on the campaign trail, at a grass-roots fundraiser to show support for the little people that still believed they could help elect him.
 
Candidate Barron had been approached by a young woman straight out of a lingerie catalog. She had been drop-dead gorgeous with amazingly blue eyes and hair of liquid gold.
 
She had that nubile, innocent co-ed look about her that hinted she was fresh out of college.
 

This alluring girl had been flashing her eyes at just the right moment and leaning over just when he happened to glance her way so he could see Heaven itself down her shirt.
 
She had flirted so hard that he felt like a college kid again himself.
 
Just when he had started to become nervous a reporter might get an improper photo for the next gaffe, he had blacked out.

He awoke in his hotel room the next day naked and tangled in the sheets on the floor, He had found her, gloriously naked, snuggled warmly against his side.
 
He slowly reached out and touched her perfectly smooth, unblemished, creamy skin.
 

She proved just as beautiful and willing as he had quasi-remembered from the night before.
 
He soon discovered she was even more talented in the bedroom than she had been at snagging his attention at the fundraiser.
 
His heart raced every time he remembered what she had begged him do to her and what she did to him.
 
But, every fiber of his being knew it was wrong.

Harold Barron loved his wife Alice, dearly.
 
After all, she was the beloved mother of his children, the constant campaign companion, and his rock of stability at the end of a day shaking hands and kissing babies.
 
His graceful, regal Alice had been the debutante queen when they had met and fallen in love so many years before.
 
They had survived The Great Pandemic together and the destruction of her family.
 
They had been woven together by fate and love.
 
And not once had he ever so much as wondered about another woman in all the years they had been married.
 
He was happy and his star was rising.
 
Why ruin a good thing?

He had been on the road campaigning alone for his running mate, Senator Denton, who would be elected President a few months later.
 
He had missed his eldest son’s birthday for that little campaign stop where he first broke his sacred vows of matrimony.
 
It was an eternal source of shame for his soul that he feared he would never fully erase.
 
And he tried very hard, every day to bury that stain and forget it.

His wife would never know what that wonderfully flexible girl had promised him in a husky voice, if he would only do a few things for her employers after he was elected to office. He still remembered laughing at the sexy co-ed while he tried to avoid her grasp.
 
Their team was 27 points behind in the polls, he had cried.
 
The Democratic Party had not been popular then.
 
There was no way they’d win the election, so blackmail would never work.
 
Yet nevertheless, he had slept with that beautiful, beguiling woman. When the press found out, he knew he’d be finished, along with the ticket’s chances at victory.
 
It would be the final scandal.
 
He began to resign himself to his fate when a thought occurred to him, cast out from his subconscious like a life preserver on an angry ocean.
 
His one chance at salvation.

He had been drugged.
 
That’s it!
 
Drugged!
 
She merely smiled and
mmmm-hmmmmed
in response as she crept closer like a tiger stalking its prey, her cobalt blue eyes never leaving his, her blond hair cascading down around her bare, smooth shoulders like a river of golden sunlight.
 
What they were doing, did, going to do—it was all wrong, he had cried out. He had pleaded with her to stop—not really, because what she did had felt so good—but he had at least tried to get her to stop. He could still tell himself he had put up a valiant defense, but she was just…

His breath came faster as he leaned forward onto his polished desk and remembered that distant morning.
 
He could still picture it like it had happened just hours ago.
 
The way she had smiled at him with those half-closed brilliant blue eyes.
 
He remembered those full, pouting lips as she had slowly, seductively crawled to him across their rumpled bed.
 
The gentle sway of her bare, snow-white breasts as she crawled to him had taken his breath away.
 
The smell of her flowery perfume wafting on the air currents from the bed to his nose mixed with the tangy smell of their lovemaking the night before had nearly drove him wild with renewed lust.
 

He shuddered, eyes closed.
 
She had been perfect.
 
Perfect in every way.
 
The perfect, pliable, willing sex slave, and she loved every second of it and begged for more.
 
She was there whenever he needed her: for release, just for fun, or to relieve the boredom of office.
 
Once—he grinned at the memory—he had just wanted to look at her naked body by firelight while he drank himself into oblivion.
 

She had—and he was sure the mysterious Reginald had been involved—somehow found a way to get a job in his very house, on his personal staff. Right under the nose of his wife and the Secret Service who were always underfoot.
 
And no one was the wiser.
 

Jayne Renolds.
 
Her name was seared in his soul.
 
His greatest passion, his greatest disgrace.

The Vice President’s fingers slowly inched toward the phone to call her into his office.
 
Something stopped him.
 
A blurry thought, a warning from deep inside the increasingly small part of his mind that was still revolted by her touch.
 

She was the one who had started this whole mess that now threatened to swallow his family and his career, legacy, and even the country in an atrocious scandal. She had somehow managed, through her shadowy “employer”, to overcome a 27-point deficit at the polls, several costly gaffs by both himself and his running mate at the last minute, and still get them into the White House. He was sure something underhanded had taken place for everything to have worked out the way it did, but there was never even a whiff of it from the media.
 
The Democrats’ victory had been declared a model for future underdogs.
 
‘Never believe the polls’ became the mantra of the President-elect.

True to his word, Vice President Barron had voted in favor of Jayne’s employer’s wishes on a few minor issues when certain funding bills were deadlocked in the Senate.
 
He had laughed his way to the podium on those votes.
 
At the time, he had thought that Jayne had attempted to blackmail him over some useless appropriation bills for farm subsidies. The opposition in the House had been stiff—both Democrats and Republicans had balked at signing off on the bills because of some claims of illegal funneling of money to black ops programs involved with the NSA, CIA, or some other alphabet-soup agency.
 
Harold Barron could not have cared less.
 
The bills were harmless as far as he knew and voting the way Jayne told him kept her between his sheets and his secret safe.
 
It was a win-win situation.
 
And his sweet Jayne had kept her word the last few years; she had never told a soul of his dalliance with her, never threatened again and was always ready to wrap her legs around him and purr like a kitten.

Now he smiled, thinking of her swaying hips as she had walked away from him earlier that morning, adjusting her blouse with a sly smile after his hand went free-range roaming.
 
He had been on a routine arms reduction call with his counterpart in Russia, mostly listening to scientists read numbers over the line.
 

He suddenly frowned.
 
She had put him in contact with “Reginald”, the voice on the odd phone calls he had been receiving over the past few years.
 
His head felt thick, like he was in a dense fog.
 
He tried to remember.
 
At first the calls had been rather innocuous.
 
The well-mannered young man on the other end had explained that he represented Jayne’s employers, and he was merely checking up on their “investment”.
 
Over time, it became obvious that her employers really wanted him helping them from within the Oval Office someday.
 
They wanted a pet President.

Reginald had called every few months, checking up on the newly elected Vice President, asking after his needs or wants, ensuring that Jayne had been keeping him well satisfied, always asking after his wife and children. It had been very cloak-and-dagger in the beginning, but then after the two farm bills had been passed—thanks to the tie breaking vote by the President of the Senate, namely, Harold Barron—the phone calls became more of an annoyance.
 
Reginald had been satisfied and had not asked for any other favors.
 
He just wanted to talk, it seemed, about nothing and then again, everything.
 
Endless, time consuming, random conversations that Harold felt compelled somehow to sit through.
 
Of course, Jayne’s persuasion hadn’t hurt…

Apparently, as far as the debt owed for getting elected was concerned, Harold was free and clear.
 
He got to “keep” Jayne as a perk of office.
 
And what a perk she was.
 
Harold sighed contentedly. The woman was insatiable.

That had all changed this past year, though.
 
He frowned again, his mind coming up for air in a fog of images and memories of Jayne.
 
He found it increasingly hard to concentrate on anything else anymore.
 
Reginald constantly floated ideas to him.
 
Numerous “what-if” scenarios were presented to him during their phone conversations, many of which seemed strange at the time, only to be forgotten.
 
Weeks later, when he was doing something completely unrelated, those ideas would flash through his mind unbidden, like shooting stars.
 
It was as if Reginald had planted them in his mind and sat back to wait for the seeds of thought to germinate.