Presidential Deal (25 page)

Chapter 40

“I say we just go to the airport, take our chances.”

“Go right ahead,” Driscoll said. “There’s a bunch of taxis right out front be glad to deliver you there.”

Brisa stared back across the table at him uncertainly. They were sitting outside on one of the terraced decks of the Neptune, the same sprawling seaside resort they’d viewed from the air during their approach to the island the night before.

Driscoll understood something of Brisa’s urgency. The storm had swerved north and east of the island, sparing them the worst of its effects. Air traffic had resumed, and they’d already seen a couple of passenger jets lift off from the nearby airfield. Driscoll felt a powerful temptation to climb aboard one of the great birds, settle back with a Bloody Mary, grab a few winks, find himself in Miami inside of an hour.

“So what’s your problem? You like hanging out like this, pretending you’re a tourist?”

Driscoll glanced down at the outfit he was wearing: matching tropical print shirt and boxer-style swim trunks, okay on a skinny guy, maybe, but in his size made him look like a jungle’s worth of migrating parrots. Brisa was wearing a turtleneck that hid most of his burns and a pair of warmup pants, a pair of knockoff Fila wraparounds perched on his nose. Anybody glancing down from his hotel room at the two of them would probably think,
There’s some fat-boy tourist getting himself all pimped up
.

And that’d be just fine, Driscoll thought, given they had no choice but to wait, despite what he’d heard on the phone earlier. After that, it had struck him that his stained and scorched sportcoat might just make him easy to spot. Nor did battered Ray Brisa present the image of the typical tourist.

He’d bought the clothes in the hotel’s gift shop, the place being open around the clock, ready to serve any customer lucky enough to win at the never-sleeping slots and gaming tables. He might have gone for something a little more stylish, but in the end they’d made their choices from the sale rack: using plastic seemed out of the question, and he needed to keep hold of what cash he had left—there was no telling what obstacles lay ahead of them.

He’d already dropped a couple of hundred at the hospital where they’d taken Gavin, enough to turn the emergency room personnel around, get them convinced they could take a look at the man’s charred backside after all. Another deuce for Gavin’s cousin Cork, whom Gavin, even in his pain-addled state, had insisted they go see.

Cork, it had turned out, ran the beachfront concessions along the stretch by the Neptune. And through Cork, he’d divested himself of another four bills for the guys who were going to help them out of their present predicament, that being how to get out of Dodge. Four bills was a bargain, Driscoll thought, but Cork would only take what he called “necessary expenses,” given that Driscoll had saved Gavin’s life. Saved it, assuming Gavin could survive treatment at that shitheel hospital, Driscoll thought. He broke off his thoughts, rousing himself to answer Brisa’s question at last.

“I’m going to like it a lot better if that bar ever opens,” Driscoll said, pointing at a nearby tiki hut perched in the dunes above the beach. A bartender in a shirt even more ridiculous than Driscoll’s poked about, opening and closing cooler doors, rearranging liquor bottles on shelves. “Then I’m going to have a big-ass drink and one for you, too.”

Brisa looked away, out over the water that had begun to shade from slate toward blue as the sun climbed above the towers behind them. “I just think you’re paranoid, man. Like maybe you watched too many spy movies or something. We could take ourselves out to the airport, give them somebody else’s name, man.”

“You may be right, Ray. I’d let you go find out, but if I’m the one who is, then there wouldn’t be any second chance. The guys I’m talking about get their hands on a guy, they got a way of making him share his deepest feelings.”

“I just don’t get it. So what, this Bailey guy don’t answer his phone. Maybe he’s asleep, like some normal person. Give him another shot, he ought to be up by now.”

“I already left enough in the system,” Driscoll said. “We’ll talk to Dedric when we get home.”

Brisa turned away then, clearly out of patience. He was a savvy enough kid, Driscoll thought, and whatever else he thought of Brisa, he owed him one for last night. But no matter how street smart he was, the kid couldn’t be expected to appreciate the dark suspicions in Driscoll’s mind.

And maybe Brisa was right, maybe it was all paranoia to think Angel Salazar was still connected the way Driscoll thought. Maybe all that weirdness on the phone meant nothing. Maybe it was the kind of thinking that was fueled by cynicism, by thirty years of viewing the inhumanity of the species at too close a range, but as Driscoll had already pointed out, there wouldn’t be any second chances if his suspicions were true.

He heard powerboats in the distance then, and glanced up to see a pair of sleek racing-style boats clipping the waves a hundred yards or so offshore. The boats came abreast of the Neptune’s beach, then began angling toward shore.

“Look alive,” Driscoll said, nudging Brisa.

“What are you talking about?” Brisa said.

“These got to be our guys,” Driscoll said. He was already pushing himself up from the table.

“Those are toy boats, man,” Brisa said.

“Sometimes your bigger ships have these tender boats,” Driscoll said. “Little ones take you out beyond the reef, you get on your cruiser, go where you have to go.”

Brisa glanced up at him over the rim of his phony Filas, hardly convinced. Driscoll shrugged and moved off toward the wooden staircase that zigzagged down through the dunes toward the water.

By the time they hit the beach, the two powerboats had anchored just beyond the breakers. There were pilots at the wheel of each boat, while a third guy had jumped out to wade through the mild surf to shore. The guy was unfurling a banner between a wooden platform with a ramp that led down toward the water and a pole jammed into the sand several feet away when Driscoll approached.

“You want to take a ride, mahn,” the guy said. It didn’t sound like a question.

“Cork says we should,” Driscoll responded.

The guy nodded without looking at him. “We can do that,” he said. He finished tying off the banner, finally turned around. He pointed at Brisa, who stood a few feet away, studying the wording of the banner.

“How about your friend? He want a ride too?”

“Cork says we both ought to try it,” Driscoll said.

“Then tell him come on,” the guy said, motioning toward the anchored boats.

Chapter 41

“You have to understand that the sanctity of the individual life is a fairly recent historical development. The concept didn’t gain much force until the Renaissance,” the man in the tweed coat was saying. He wore reading glasses, a closely trimmed gray beard, and sported a good haircut. He’d been identified at the outset of this
Good Morning America
segment as a professor of humanistic studies at the New School of Social Research.

Lawrence Chappelear, who sat with the President in the living area of his suite, watching the program, thought the man probably rated his own life fairly far along up the scale.

“It’s something that certain cultures, our own included, value much more highly than others. To give you an idea of how these notions evolve culturally, just watch some of our own films made in the forties, when the concepts of valor and duty held so much more weight. Then try to imagine selling the American public of today on the wisdom of dying for one’s country. You’d never get such a film made. We’ve become so much more self-oriented. Heroes perform only out of self-interest nowadays,” the professor said. “Or because they’re paid to.”

The hosts of the program nodded as the television camera panned their faces. Charlie Gibson looked like he might be willing to take the professor on faith, but his female cohort seemed disturbed. “How much of this thinking is male-oriented?” she asked. “For instance, I can’t imagine any mother anywhere, in any time, who wouldn’t do anything to save the life of her child.”

The professor paused. “Well,” he said, “that’s a good question. I doubt very much that it’s women who are responsible for these atrocities.”

He gave her a sympathetic look. “Do understand, the very point of terrorism is to undermine a culture’s belief system, to cast doubt, to cause uncertainty.”

“But for what reason?” she persisted.

The professor raised his hands. “Sometimes for no other reason than that itself,” he said. “I call it the Iago Syndrome.”

Charlie Gibson seemed to sense trouble. “You’ve been involved with the assessment of a number of hostage situations,” he cut in. “What does it suggest to you that there’s been no ransom, no demands, no communication of any kind since the disappearance of the First Lady?”

Chappelear stole a glance at the President, who was slumped in the side chair of the desk he’d been using, staring impassively at the monitor. He was wearing yesterday’s suit, a shirt without a tie, still hadn’t shaven. The look of a man coming off a weeklong bender, Chappelear thought, though he knew the man hadn’t had a drink in his presence, at least.

The professor stared into the camera before he answered. His voice softened, as if he knew who was watching. “We’re into our third day now. Studies tell us the prognosis becomes less optimistic the longer the passage of time,” he said. “This is a rather special case, however. I’d hesitate before making any assumptions.”

The President held up a remote unit, clicked
Good Morning America
into oblivion, then turned to Chappelear. “How about you, Larry? You made any assumptions yet?”

Chappelear drew himself up, a wad of the most recent reports in his hand. Much sound and fury in all these printed words, he thought. All of it come to nothing so far.

“She’s still with us, sir,” he said finally. “Everything I know tells me that.”

The President stared back at him. “That’s good, Larry,” he said. He flipped the remote unit over his shoulder. It hit the corner of the desk and split open, sending its batteries flying to the floor. “You keep me away from the television now, you hear?”

Chappelear nodded. He thought he’d felt something give inside himself as well.

Chapter 42

“What’s left out there?”

“It’s okay,” Deal called down to her. “Come on, take my hand.”

Her hand emerged from the darkness then, groping about, the skin pale and shriveled from the damp, her nails ragged and ringed with dirt. He fought off a wave of sadness at that sight and took her hand and pulled, bringing her blind and blinking into the light. He steadied her with his hands at her shoulders, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

“Dear God,” she said at last, her voice barely above a whisper.

“You want to sit down a minute?”

She shook her head groggily, shading her eyes. The sky was still overcast, but compared with the darkness they’d been in, it seemed ablaze out here. “Where are we?” Her voice was dazed.

“The same place we were last night,” he said. He sensed something of what she had to be feeling.

She turned completely around. A slow circle. He’d done the same thing himself.

“But there’s nothing,” she said. “Everything’s gone. Everything.” He heard the protest in her voice.

He nodded. She was right. It couldn’t be. But it was.

Twelve hours before, they’d run for their lives up a forested trail. Now they stared down a slope that had been blasted clean, defoliated as if by a bomb blast. Here and there a shattered stump rose up a few feet into the steamy air and huge clumps of brush and uprooted trees were strewn about, but not a single tree had been left standing. The view down to the waterline was unobstructed now, but it was difficult to believe they were looking at the same place where they’d spied on men trying to save themselves and their boat the night before.

The short pier where the boat had been tied off had vanished. To the east, where there had been a house, there was nothing. When he looked closer, he could make out the vague outline of concrete footings, saw perhaps a length of white PVC piping jutting into the air, but it was a little too far away to be sure.

Behind them, where there had been the hollow of a deep vine-choked quarry site, there was now a lake, maybe two hundred feet across, filled to the brim with seawater left behind by the big wave. Where their makeshift prison had stood, there was a tumble of block and the spar of a shattered timber poking from the rubble.

The air, which was improbably calm, was sodden with humidity and sea smells. He noticed a fish on the rocky ground at his feet, a sizable grunt already bloating up in the heat. He saw another and another, and realized that the ground was littered with them, smaller fish for the most part: grunt, mullet, snapper, among those he recognized.

Here and there something larger. A silvery barracuda lay a few feet from the lake, easily four feet from tip to tail. Another couple of flops, he thought, it might have made its way to that new inland sea where it could have survived, for a little while at least.

He sensed her staggering at his side and reached out to steady her again. “I think I will sit down,” she said.

He helped her to a seat on one of the boulders that had not been displaced, then sat down next to her. “There’s so much sky all of a sudden,” she said, glancing up.

“That’s what we all said after the hurricane went through Miami,” he said.

“Really?” she said. Her voice was hollow. Doing her best, he thought. Fighting that despair that threatened to explode at any second. He knew the feeling.

“You don’t realize until all those trees are gone.” He sat quietly, thinking how he’d felt when he’d come out of his home after Andrew, found his lifelong landscape suddenly transformed.

They sat quietly for a moment before she turned to him again. “You think we’re the only ones left?” she said, glancing up at him, finally.

He gave her a look, swept his arm about. They were perched on the highest part of the island, hardly a hilltop, but enough to give them a view of what they’d inherited: a chunk of coral that jutted up out of the water, maybe a mile from east to west, half that in width. Men could hide in the tangles of trees and brush that had been left behind, he supposed, but what would they be hiding from?

“What are we going to do, John?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask that question,” he said.

“Then you should have some snappy answer ready for me,” she said.

He nodded. “What I’ve been trying to do is tell myself how lucky we are. That we lived through it.”

She glanced around them. “The old half-full, half-empty thing, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay,” she said. “After that, then.”

“It’s rule number one,” he said. “You have to start off telling yourself what’s positive. Otherwise…” He trailed off.

“If you try to tell me about all the fish we’ve got to eat, I’m going to scream,” she said.

He nodded, tried to give her a smile.

“The weather’s clearing,” he said. “There ought to be search planes out soon enough.”

She nodded. “I’m thirsty,” she said after a moment.

“So am I,” he said.

“I wish I’d thought of it last night, all that rain…” She broke off, staring down into the crevasse. “Maybe there’s a pool down there.”

He shook his head. “I thought of that earlier,” he said. “It’s all broken rock where we were, the water just percolated on through.”

She nodded, licked her lips. “It’s worse now that I mentioned it.”

“I’d try to think of something else,” he said.

“So tell me about these search planes,” she said.

“Lots of them,” he said. “Guy from the cavalry in every one.”

“Uh-huh. You’re thinking about something else, aren’t you?” she said.

He gave what he hoped was a blank look.

“Something worse than the water,” she said.

He studied her for a moment. “My wife used to do that,” he said.

“Read your mind?”

He nodded. “She said I should never play poker.”

“She was right,” Linda told him. “You going to tell me now?”

He shrugged. “There’s not much we can do about it…”

She thought for a moment, then recognition came over her features. “You think there are more of them somewhere, don’t you?”

He shrugged again.

“You think there are people somewhere who know where we were taken, that they’ll show up wanting to see what’s happened.”

“It’s possible.”

She glanced about the barren skies nervously.

“Nobody’s shown up yet,” he said. “Maybe that’s a good sign, or maybe there’s heavy weather between us and them.” He shrugged. “Like I said, though, there’s not too much we can do about it.”

“So I should try to think about something else, is that it?”

He stood up, took a deep breath. “I was thinking maybe we could poke around a little bit.” He indicated the crevasse. “All that rainwater has to go someplace,” he said. “Maybe there’s some kind of a spring that pops up closer to the shoreline.”

“A spring?” she said doubtfully.

“Come on,” he said, reaching for her hand. “It’s a long shot, but that’s rule number two when you’ve just been hammered.”

“What is?” she said.

“Get off your ass and move,” he said. Then started down the path.