Presidential Deal (2 page)

Part 1: Primaries

Chapter 1

Washington, D.C., June 6

“I’m thinking this was not such a good idea.” It was the man in the plaid Bermuda shorts and purple Georgetown University sweatshirt speaking.

He wasn’t looking at Salazar, who sat in stylish linens on the marble bench beside him. He had his gaze fixed instead upon the enormous, brightly lit visage of Abraham Lincoln that loomed in its niche nearby.

It was a balmy night, not quite ten, the early summer heat dissipated into invitation, even promise, the stars glittering overhead. Tourists still lolled about the Mall. Knots of schoolchildren roamed here and there, shepherded by their chaperones, chattering, shrieking, clambering up and down the ghostly steps of the monument.

“And why is that?” Salazar responded, his voice mild.

He turned, saw that Salazar was watching on a willowy girl in a plaid uniform jumper and knee-high socks standing several yards away. The girl, tall, serene, her features about to transform themselves from childish beauty into loveliness, had drifted apart from her group, an especially rowdy bunch, to stare up at the statue of Lincoln, intent.

“No one who works in this town ever goes sightseeing,” he said.

“Yes,” Salazar said, his eyes still on the girl. “And that is why no one you know will see you here.”

The girl turned. Sixteen, possibly seventeen, going on ageless. She couldn’t have heard, but it seemed as if she had. Her glance flickered over him, held for a moment on Salazar. He had learned long ago that his was a face that did not attract the attention of women. He did all right at close quarters, but someone with Salazar’s dark allure, well…

There was some shift of expression there, a narrowing of the girl’s eyes, maybe…then she turned away, moving back toward her group with a toss of her long hair.

She knows what this man is
, he found himself thinking.
And still she would have him
.

“I have presented you with the solution to all your problems,” Salazar said. His eyes followed the knot of schoolchildren as they drifted away into the darkness. Finally he turned. “And now it is time for you to accept my proposal.”

He shook his head. He’d known it was coming. He cursed himself for even agreeing to meet Salazar this night. But there had been times when he’d needed Salazar, hadn’t there? He owed him the courtesy of a face-to-face, at least.

He drew a breath, met Salazar’s gaze. “I’ve thought about it, but we’ll take our chances by ourselves,” he said.

“And you will lose the election.”

“You seem awfully certain.”

“I’ve read the same reports that you have, my friend. Malcolm Jesse is
your
analyst, not Senator Hollingsworth’s, is it not so?”

He stared back, poker-faced. Malcolm Jesse had produced three sets of data: one for official release, with projections on the race so sunny he doubted even the dullest readers of the daily newspapers believed them; the second was a slightly less rosy set designed for unofficial “leakage” and intended to offset skepticism concerning the official report. The third set of figures told the truth, so far as Malcolm Jesse and his statistical gnomes could determine it. How Salazar had gained access to those carefully guarded figures, he had no idea.

“I have lived long because I make it my business to know such things,” Salazar said.

He turned away, trying to hide his discomfort. What the hell was it? He’d been at the right hand of the President for nearly four years, had traveled the halls of power another dozen before that. He’d bluffed foreign leaders, sold transparent lies to U.S. congressmen. But Angel Salazar, provocateur, mercenary, lifelong opportunist, could look inside his head and read the thoughts as clearly as if in screaming neon: “
Find a way to take Florida or we’re dead!”

“President Sheldon cannot go hat in hand to Jorge Vas,” he said flatly. “The man makes the NRA look like a pack of flaming liberals.” Vas was the leader of the Cuban émigré community in the United States. His authority was unquestioned, as were his politics. And if Malcolm Jesse’s third set of figures was to be believed, Vas held the key votes; he alone had the power to deliver the state of Florida, and the election, into Frank Sheldon’s hands.

“If we proceed as I say, your president will not have to go hat in hand,” Salazar said. “We will stage our little incident, laying the blame at the feet of the international cabal of communism, and your president will issue a stinging rebuke of these actions, and Jorge Vas will have appropriate reason to lend his support as a result. It is perfect public theater and everyone can save the precious face.”

He heard the bitterness in Salazar’s intentional twisting of the phrase. There was a child’s shriek from somewhere in the darkness, an answering burst of laughter. He conjured up the face of the young girl whom he had watched, teetering on the cusp: on one side all the ideals chiseled in marble, on the other the truth of Salazar’s leer.

“What’s in it for you, Salazar?” he asked.

Salazar raised his shoulders in the slightest of shrugs. “There is some expense involved, of course,” he said, pausing thoughtfully. “Let us say five million dollars.”

He stared. “You’re crazy.”

Salazar shrugged again. “One million now. The rest after the election.” He smiled. “Politics aside, I’d prefer the continuity. It’s always difficult, breaking in a new administration.”

He stifled the urge to laugh. “Just call up the Treasury, have them cut a check, is that it?”

Salazar’s smile never left him. “You have a war chest, my friend. This is war.”

He stood, fed up. Most of his adult life had been spent cutting deals, proclaiming an interest in spreading democracy, then sitting down with men like Salazar to do the opposite, all in the name of necessity. Two steps forward, one step back, that’s how the process was justified, but it more often seemed like one step forward, two steps back. Now Salazar wanted five million dollars to stage a “controlled” riot in Miami—like saying he wanted to pull the trigger on the A-bomb but cut off the reaction before the mushroom cloud appeared, wasn’t it?—so that these dances of deception could continue indefinitely.

“You’ve wasted my evening,” he said. “Even if it worked…”

“It
will
work,” Salazar cut in.

“Forget it.” He turned abruptly, jostling a tourist who’d been backing toward them, camera pointed at the monument and his beaming, snowy-haired wife.

“Excuse me,” he muttered at the man, moving away across the Mall. He heard more shrieks from the darkness, no answering laughter this time. There was a distant wail of a siren, but it seemed to be receding, not approaching.

He had taken half a dozen steps, no more, when he felt Salazar’s hand grip his arm. Thumb by his elbow, fingers in the soft flesh beneath his biceps. He started to turn, to order the man away, when he felt the incredible pain. Though he willed himself to keep going, he felt his breath constrict, his legs go leaden. If Salazar had not been holding him tightly, he would have pitched face-first against the pavement.

He saw a park policeman up ahead, the officer hurrying off toward the darkness and those unending shrieks.
Call out for help
, he thought,
put an end to this insanity once and for all
.

“You
will
help me,” Salazar repeated, his voice rasping, the man’s breath hot at his cheek. “We have too much history, my friend. And the world will learn everything, every last detail, every little secret, every agreement, every favor I have arranged at your behest. You, your president and his precious liberal’s façade, there is too much at risk here, do you understand me?”

He felt the pressure loosen at his arm then, and the pain disappeared, as if by magic. He could breathe again, and he stumbled forward, feeling his feet regain their rhythm. He felt a renewed burst of outrage, and though the park policeman had vanished into the darkness, this was something he could take care of on his own. He was an important man in this town, for God’s sake, even if he was, at this moment, wearing some idiot’s disguise of floppy shorts and purple sweatshirt, and he would not be treated this way by a subhuman creature who had been well paid for a few necessary favors. He would never agree to his plans in a million years.

He drew a breath and turned, ready to set Salazar straight once and for all. There was Lincoln gazing down from his perch, sirens and shrieks behind him, flashbulbs and nervous glances into the darkness…

He met Salazar’s eyes. “Goddammit,” he said, his chest heaving. He paused, drew another breath, felt the weariness rising like a tide until it seemed he would choke on it.

“A controlled disturbance, you said. Break a couple of windows, fire a few shots in the air. That’s all…” He heard the words coming from his mouth as if from a stranger’s.

Salazar in turn was nodding, his smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “Do not concern yourself with details,” he said soothingly. “I am very good at what I do.”

He stared back, feeling exhausted, as if he’d just stumbled to the end of some marathon run. His head was leaden, and throbbing…and he was nodding in response, a motion almost casual, seeming quite apart from will.

What awful cries from the darkness now.

News item:
Washington Times

Chapter 2

Two
A.M.
, a hot June night, humidity pumping in off an Atlantic easterly, so much moisture in the air, you ought to be half fish just to be able to walk around, or so Ray Brisa was thinking. Maybe he was half fish himself, maybe his lungs had these pink feathery fringes growing already, maybe one day he’d wake up and find himself with a pair of gills sprouted from the coppery skin just behind his ears. Fish-man, they could call him. Or Gil. Or ’Cuda.

Cuda
had the right ring to it. Bad-ass fish, more teeth than you could count, stick your hand in Ray Brisa’s water, see how much comes out. He smiled at the thought of it, at the way his mind worked, surprise a minute, million minutes in a day.

He heard the sound of an engine, then glanced down the deserted street toward Biscayne Boulevard, the direction from which Zito and Luis would naturally come. He’d been waiting for an hour and a half, breathing in all the seawater air that was turning his skin to scales, keeping an eye on the building, making sure that when and if the other two showed up, they’d be alone, though there wasn’t too much to worry about, the neighborhood that surrounded the area of warehouses and shops where he waited being so bad that even the lowlifes hung out someplace else.

Ray wasn’t personally concerned. He knew no one from this or any other neighborhood was about to mess with him. No one ever messed with him, no one in his right mind, anyway. Not that he was so big, not that he worked on looking so bad, it had just always been that way, from the time he was four years old, it was as if the other kids could feel something pulsing out of his brain, some signal on the street-kid wavelength that said, “Leave
this
twisted mother alone.”

Ray couldn’t remember actually doing much to create this apprehension beyond the fact of always coming out on top of the usual street-corner scraps, though he could date his understanding of just how feared he had become back to the time six other kids jumped him and held him down and one kid on top of him with a baseball bat aimed at his head—Ray saw the look in the kid’s eye and knew the kid wanted to kill him out of pure fear, like “Wipe this sonofabitch out before we
all
die”—but then, wouldn’t you know it, a police cruiser happened around the corner and Ray got to live after all, the kid with the bat moved away with his family a week or so after.

Ray leaned back against the wall of the building, found the edge of a brick he could use to dig into the muscles of his back, work out some kink that had arisen there. A hell of a thing to remember, wasn’t it, you’re maybe eight or nine years old and realize another person wants to kill you for reasons you don’t even know?

Meantime, still no Zito, no Luis. He checked his watch. He should have gone along with them, and would have, except that he never liked to take a chance on being surprised, never again. There could be somebody with a bat come up on you when you least expected it, that was Ray Brisa’s philosophy, one of the many hard lessons of his youth.

Nothing he’d worked consciously on, of course. It was just the way his mind worked. Like the one law of physics Ray remembered from his desultory years of high school, a cartoon movie with some Donald Duck character demonstrating, pound one end of a teeter-totter with a big hammer, the other end fires your ass into outer space—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, so if you’ve got trouble in mind, stay far the fuck away from Ray Brisa.

End of story, he nodded, for Zito and Luis were pulling up to the curb in a shiny new Suburban now, both of them grinning, jerking around in their seats to the beat of whatever song they had tuned to the max on the sound system of the vehicle they’d stolen. Big Zito behind the wheel, his pupils shrunk to the size of pencil points, whatever he was taking, Ray was surprised he could even see. Probably he couldn’t. It was Luis looking around for where Ray might be, half-assed kind of looking, of course. Ray shook his head, stepping out of the shadows toward them. If he was a barracuda, any kind of fish, then these two had to be sea worms.

He hit the hood of the Suburban with the flat of his palm and the two inside jumped. “Whoa, man,” Luis said as the passenger window glided down. “Scare the shit out of me.”

“Then there’d be nothing left,” Ray said. “Turn that radio off.”

Luis obeyed.

“There a hitch on this thing?” Ray asked.

“You said get a truck with a hitch, that’s what we got,” Luis said. “There was a big-ass boat behind it, too. Zito wanted to take it along, drop it somewhere we could come back to, but I told him we didn’t have time.”

Zito gave Luis a look. “Was Luis wanted the boat,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Luis said.

“Shut up,” Ray said. “Both of you.”

There was silence.

Ray listened to the purr of the big V-8 beneath the hood of the Suburban, calming down, readying himself, arranging every atom for the task at hand. Not even sea worms, he thought. What was it that fish ate? Plankton, wasn’t it? Then that’s what Zito and Luis were, plankton with arms and legs and faces.

“Everything else in back?” he said, glancing toward the rear of the Suburban.

“Sure, everything’s in back,” Luis said.

Ray didn’t like the tone of Luis’s voice, but he put the thought out of his mind. They had less than an hour to get where they were going. “Then take it up over the curb, Zito,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

Pinholes for pupils or not, Zito could drive. He had the big Suburban in reverse and over the high curb in seconds, stopping just short of the heavy iron gates protecting the store’s entrance. By the time Ray got to the back of the vehicle, the rear window had already slid down. He glanced up the deserted street once again, then dropped the tailgate.

He reached in, pulled out the six-foot length of anchor chain they’d adapted for their uses, handed one hooked end to Luis, who wrapped it around the door grating. At the same time, Ray bent to loop the other hook around the Suburban’s heavy-duty hitch. He gave Zito the high sign and the Suburban lunged forward, jouncing down over the curb. There was an awful screech of metal on metal, the sound of a thousand metal comb fingers across glass, and then the heavy steel doors burst out of their concrete casing and crashed to the sidewalk.

Ray heard an alarm bell clanging as the clatter died away, but he doubted the sound could carry to anyone who gave a shit. For that matter, he was fairly certain the place had a direct-wire alarm as well, but that didn’t concern him, either. Inside was what he needed. Short of nuclear response, nothing was going to keep him from it now.

Before the concrete dust had drifted from the ragged opening where the doors had once been, the three of them were inside, Luis wielding the twelve-pound sledge on the display cases they’d scouted earlier in the day, Ray and Zito right after him, lugging the heavy pry bars they’d need for the steel-barred racks. Emergency lights atop the alarms had popped on, illuminating the place in a garish, otherworldly fashion. Mostly they made it that much easier to work.

There was the sound of shattering glass, of shrieking, splintering wood. Zito out with one canvas sack of goods to toss in the back of the Suburban, Luis close on his heels, Ray already busy with the bar of the second rack.

By the time Ray had finally popped the retaining bolt free, the other two were back to help him load, everything going about as well as he could hope. He motioned Luis out the door and led Zito toward the prize of the night, an antitank rocket launcher that the owner had mounted on a pedestal like some god of gun shops. It wasn’t on the order list, but what the hell, if the people they were working for tonight didn’t want it,
someone
would pay good money for it.

The stand had been bolted to the pedestal, but it hardly mattered. Four blows with the twelve-pound sledge, the thing was free and slung across big Zito’s shoulders, Ray fast on his heels, dragging the heavy box of shells through the debris.

Zito dumped the launcher into the back of the Suburban, then turned to help Ray heave the wooden box in after. Luis was behind the wheel now, moving them away from the curb before Ray and Zito had slammed their doors. They were at the end of the block in seconds, two more quick turns onto Biscayne, half a mile to the entrance ramp of I-95, and joined with the light but never-ending Miami traffic, like the Chinese that could line up and march forever into the ocean, Ray thought, checking his watch again, total elapsed time, from gates on the sidewalk to rolling down the highway, less than five minutes. Assuming the shop had been wired, assuming best-case response, the cops wouldn’t be arriving on the scene for another minute or so.

Five minutes’ work, twenty-five thousand dollars
, Ray thought. He settled back in the plush leather seat, allowed himself a smile. “You know where you’re going, Luis?” he asked.

“Man,” Luis said in his whiny voice, “why you keep asking shit like that?”

“Just the way my mind works,” Ray said evenly. “The way it does.”

***

They’d scheduled
the drop for a warehouse district near Tamiami Airport, a noncommercial field far to the south and west of the city. Ray favored it as a place to do business, partly because it offered his customers a ready way to move or store whatever goods he was delivering, partly because he knew a dozen ways in and out of the canal- and lake-encircled place, and partly because it was remote and otherworldly, to his city-bred tastes, anyway.

He could pick out a spot, give someone a route in, he’d take another, and know of three or four more out, in case of emergency. He’d get there early, post Zito and Luis in places where they could do some good should anything go wrong, then kill time all alone, out there on the edge of civilization, in the middle of tall pines and sawgrass a couple of miles from where the Everglades began for real, just chill out, watch the clouds scud by the moon, by the time whoever it was showed up, they’d find Ray Brisa all alone in the middle of nowhere, composed, in control, ready to do any kind of business at hand.

Like right now, for instance. Ray lounging with his back against the warm grillwork of the Suburban, arms folded across his chest, watching some kind of owl whisk across the night sky like a big bat, light on a tree branch twenty yards away, take up his own post. Ray couldn’t see the creature’s eyes, of course, but he could feel them. The owl staring right down at him when it was supposed to be hunting the rats that favored the area. Ray cocked his head, staring back at the blunt-shouldered silhouette, and swore he saw the owl copy his motion. There was a soft coughing sound from somewhere, and Ray glanced off in the direction where Luis was supposed to be. He listened intently for a moment, but there was nothing else. When he turned back, the owl was gone.

He heard the distant sound of an engine then, the sound rising and falling as the driver made his way through the twists and turns of the route that Ray had provided. It was another full minute at least before he saw headlights, saw the late-model sedan, an off-white top-end Chevy with smoked glass—except for the windows, the kind of car a cop with some suck might ride.

The front doors opened then and two short guys got out on either side of the car, careful to keep what they could of steel and glass in front of them. After a moment, the guy who’d been driving turned and said something into the back. A rear door opened then and a taller guy in dark jeans and a turtleneck got out. The tall guy looked around, smiled, held his hands out from his body as if to show the owls and the looming trees that there was nothing to be afraid of.

A couple more moments of silence, the guy reached into the car, came out with a briefcase, put it on top of the Chevy, opened it up. He turned back, making a slow semicircle before all the nothingness in front of him: a warren of U-Store-It warehouses connected by a maze of alleyways. He held the briefcase by the lid with one hand, shone a light down on the contents with the other.

Ray could see the guy’s face in the reflection. Handsome guy himself, shiny scar up the side of his neck just like Ray had been told. Fine. Right guy, right time, the money looked right. All that remained was to live through the rest.

Ray stepped out then, and one of the guys at the front of the Chevy whirled around, just about shit himself. The guy dropped onto a knee behind the hood of the Chevy, pistol out, all kinds of excited Spanish coming out of his mouth, most of it having to do with the fact that there was a cop coming out of the darkness toward them.

“Shut up,” the tall guy said, and Ray felt an instant identification. The gunman’s excited rattle stopped.

Ray came straight ahead, ignoring the two thugs, both of whom had drawn down on him now, edging in a jerky, sole-grinding way a safe distance alongside him, pistols raised in two-handed stances. Sawed-off, banty-rooster versions of something they’d seen on American TV, was what Ray thought.

Ray stopped a couple of paces from the boss, jerked his head at the two thugs. “They still watching
Scarface
down where you come from?”

The tall man glanced at the gunmen, turned back to Ray. “Policemen make them nervous,” he said.

Ray nodded, took off the uniform cap, unpinned the badge, tossed it in the cap, handed both items to the tall man. He gave the two thugs a significant look, then moved his hands to his gun belt, undid the clasps, handed that to the tall man as well. The tall man checked the mobile phone resting in its pocket, beeped it on and off. He popped the holster strap, inspected the weapon, replaced it, tossed everything in the back of the Chevy.

He turned, regarded Ray’s crisp uniform shirt, the dark brown slacks, the permanently shining black brogans that Ray was wearing.

“You have brought everything, then?”

Ray reached into his pocket, ignoring the pistol that one of the thugs brought to within an inch of his cheek. He withdrew something that resembled a small TV controller, pushed a series of buttons on the keypad. One of the warehouse doors behind him began to grind upward.

After a moment, he pressed another button and the doors came to a halt. There was just enough room to see the antitank gun set up on its tripod, the wooden box of shells nearby.