The Jury Master (45 page)

“If you believed that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Peak’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a fishing cork. “And you know who this person is, el Profeta?”

Sloane did not answer.

“You want something for it.”

“Not much, really. Not given what’s at stake. You took my life. I’m going to take yours. There are times when a few must be sacrificed for the good of the country, for the good of the many. It’s not my rule, either, Mr. Peak. You have my terms.”

Peak shook his head. “I won’t do it.”

Sloane turned and walked toward the door. “Then you’ll be dead by noon tomorrow.”

88

A
T 10 A.M. THE ROSE GARDEN
warmed under a brilliant morning sun. Secret Service officers took up positions along the rooftops of nearby buildings and swarmed over the White House grounds with dogs trained to detect chemicals used in explosives. Workers set up chairs and put the finishing touches on an elevated platform on which the dignitaries would stand. Cars parked within six blocks were towed; manhole covers were sealed with torches. Press credentials for the estimated 250 journalists were meticulously scrutinized.

Across town, Miguel Ibarón emerged from a secured lobby in a classified hotel and hobbled down a concrete walk toward a waiting car. Despite not having slept, he felt alert and calm. As he sat back against the leather, memories flooded him, a lifetime coming and going. He thought of that moment, thirty years earlier, when he separated the dense foliage and returned to find them all slaughtered, and how he had vowed that day, upon their blood, that he would live long enough to exact revenge on the man who had done it.

Today was that day.

Today Robert Peak would die.

He had kept his word.

Sensing the passage of time, Ibarón shook the memories and looked at his watch. Thirty minutes had passed since they left the hotel—sufficient time to arrive at the White House, even with the anticipated security checks. He looked out the window, but the scenery did not look familiar. He leaned forward, pressed the intercom, and spoke to the wall of glass that separated him from his driver.

“Why is it taking so long?”

The driver did not respond.

Ibarón depressed the button again. “Driver, why is it taking so long?”

No answer.

He tapped gently with the handle of his cane.

The driver did not acknowledge him. The limousine merged onto a different highway.

Ibarón freed himself from his seat belt and rapped on the glass with greater force. Still it brought no response. He reached for the door handle; it could not be unlocked from the inside. He flipped the switch to lower the window. The glass did not move. He felt the rush of anxiety.

What was this?

He beat the gold handle on the glass. It flexed but did not break.

“Where are we?” he demanded. “Answer me! I am expected at the ceremony. They will look for me.”

The intercom clicked. “You are not expected at the ceremony,” the driver said, his voice calm and impassive. “And they will not look for you.”

“I demand that you take me to the White House.”

“You are in no position to make demands.”

A pain gripped his chest, restricting his breathing. He loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt, thoughts rushing through his head. He thought of Ruíz and his concern because the CIA had made inquiries into the Mexican Liberation Front. Someone had been looking for him. But who? This man Joe Branick? Why? Who was he? How could he have possibly known he was el Profeta?

He began to cough, a spasmodic wheezing that took away his breath and left him sucking for air and spitting phlegm into his handkerchief. When he looked up he noticed the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“They will search for the limousine,” he said, calmly wiping his mouth. “The ceremony will not go forward without me. They will find and punish you, whoever you are.”

“They will not search for you, because you are reported to be too sick to attend the ceremony. They will not look for the limousine, because your car and driver were canceled. And they will not find me, because I am already dead.”

Ibarón sat back against the seat, his mind working more furiously with each passing minute. Already dead? The man was crazy, but if his intent was to kill Ibarón, he was sorely mistaken. The cane, the instrument that God had placed in his hands to support him during his crippling illness, would be the instrument to get him through security. Brilliantly modified, the inner cylinder of high-quality steel was capable of handling and firing three .44-caliber bullets; the trigger was a small release in the gold handle.

The driver turned onto a dirt road, and the car bounced and pitched up a narrow incline, each bump sending daggers of pain shooting through Ibarón’s ravaged bones. Then, just as unexpectedly, it came to a rolling stop and the driver turned off the engine. Ibarón leaned forward to look out the windows. “Where are we? Why have you stopped here?”

The driver disengaged the locks with a pop, opened his door, and stepped out. Ibarón clutched the handle of his cane, prepared to attack, when the back door opened, but the man made no advance toward the car. He walked off and stood on a bluff, hands in his pockets as if admiring the view.

What kind of game was this?

Ibarón struggled with the weight of the door. He held it open with the cane as he stepped out and used the cane to navigate the uneven ground, picking his spots carefully. He stopped six feet behind the driver. “Who are you? What game is this you play? Face me.”

Sloane turned. The face was not like the one he remembered. It was no longer richly handsome with prominent, angular features and a head of black hair. It had become narrow, with sunken cheekbones, the chin pointed, the hair thin and white—the face of a man critically ill and without long to live. The eyes, however, remained the same: pools of dark chocolate that radiated power. It was the eyes that Sloane remembered and that had allowed him to pick Ibarón from the photographs of the Mexican delegation.

Though the bitterness and anger that Sloane felt for Robert Peak called out for revenge—thirsted for it—Charles Jenkins was right. Joe Branick realized that the assassination of Robert Peak was not the answer, and Sloane knew that he could not allow his own hatred to undo the reason why Joe Branick had died. The demands he gave William Brewer were modest. He wanted Aileen Blair flown to Washington, D.C. He wanted the chance to meet Robert Peak and let him know that whatever decision Sloane made, it would be for Joe Branick and had nothing to do with saving Robert Peak, and he wanted to meet el Profeta alone.

When he had left Peak in the solarium, Aileen Blair sat quietly in a chair, patiently waiting. Nothing would save Robert Peak from Aileen Blair.

“Do you not know me?” Sloane asked Ibarón. “Many years have passed between us. The last time we saw each other I was just a boy.”

Sloane watched as the old man’s eyes peeled away the years like peeling the skin of an onion, his expression changing with each layer removed. Like Charles Jenkins’s reports, Ibarón progressed from confusion to disbelief and, finally, to shock.

“Chuy,” he whispered. He said the word as if unable to comprehend it, walking closer, studying him. “What trick is this?”

Sloane shook his head. “It is no trick, Father.”

“You are dead.”

Sloane nodded. “Yes. The boy you remember died that day, Father.”

He seemed to contemplate this for a moment, considering how it all fit together. “How? How did this happen?”

“You, Father, you are the reason this happened. You taught me the things to say. You taught me how to say them. You sent me out to preach the things I had no business preaching. You brought the soldiers that night.”

“No.”

“You used me, and your abuse killed my mother and all those people in the village that night, and it may just as well have killed me, because for the past thirty years I might as well have been dead.”

“No. You had the power.”

“I was your son. You were supposed to be my father. You were supposed to protect me, to take care of me. But you used me. You used me to pursue your hatred and politics.”

“God gave you a gift, a powerful gift.”

“Yes, he did.”

“God sent you to the people.”

“
You
sent me to the people.”

“Because you were the instrument to bring the people out of centuries of oppression and poverty. You were to deliver the Mexican people from so much misery, so much pain and suffering.”

“And instead I’ve only caused them more.”

Ibarón grew more adamant. “How can you say these things to me? I have spent thirty years planning for this day, for what they did to your mother and everyone in that village. I vowed to avenge their deaths, and your death. I have not rested one minute of one day. Now it is time. Take me to the White House and I will show you my commitment to her and to those who died that day. Take me to the White House so that I may finish it.”

“It is finished. Not as you imagined, but as it will be. No more people will die because of me, Father. Today I do what you and Robert Peak and Parker Madsen and everyone else involved cannot or will not do. Today I end the killing. It started because of me. It will end because of me.” Sloane pulled the limousine keys from his pocket.

“What are you doing?”

Sloane swung his arm backward, then suddenly forward, like a slingshot.

Ibarón lunged in horror. “No!”

The keys arced high against the blue sky, lingering for a moment as if floating on a rising current of air, catching the glint of the sun before falling, and disappearing into the thick brush at the bottom of the embankment.

Ibarón stood motionless, as if watching his life pass before his very eyes.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Sloane said. “I wish things could have been different between us.”

The old man wheeled, his body rising up like some great beast awakened from slumber, his back straightening, giving him height. The muscles of his arms and legs, so crippled an instant before, seemed to swell in size and power. He forced the tip of the cane into Sloane’s chest with enough force to send him backward a step.

“No. It is you who are mistaken. It
will
be as I imagined. You are not my son. I refuse to believe it.”

Sloane knew—how he knew, he was not sure—but in that instant he knew that the cane was the instrument of death that would have allowed Ibarón to get past security and kill Robert Peak. Yet he felt no fear. He did not relish the prospect of dying. For the first time in his life he saw a future for himself, one that included Tina and Jake—something to live for, someone to live for. But he could not do that until he had closed this chapter in his life, and if that meant dying to do the right thing, as Joe Branick had been so willing to do, then it would be so. He needed to know that he wasn’t a person like Robert Peak and Parker Madsen, a person who did his job without concern for the consequences. He needed to prove he would not be like his father, filled with a thirst for revenge, bitter and angry at the world, and consumed by hatred. He had not come to this bluff to save Robert Peak. He had come to find himself. Because in the end, he realized, he needed to know not just who he was, but what kind of person he was.

“You cannot kill me, Father. That boy is already dead.”

The tip of the cane shook, a tapping against Sloane’s chest that became more violent, as if an electric current were passing through the old man’s body and increasing in intensity, until a jolt sent Ibarón tumbling backward and off balance. His body, no longer empowered by hatred and conviction, crumbled, and he collapsed where he stood, a frail old man in whom a burning fire had been extinguished.

Sloane could not help but wonder what part of that man was a part of him. He wanted to know what shaped him as a person, but he also knew that time had long since passed and he could not change it. He would not be defined by others but by his own acts and deeds. He could change the future.

He touched the old man’s shoulder as he passed, leaving him alone on the flattop, peering to the heavens, babbling incoherently. And as he walked past the car and started down the dirt and gravel road, a small wind kicked up as if to usher him away, rustling the leaves of the trees standing like an honor guard along the fire trail, silent witnesses to history. Behind him he heard the hushed flow of the river, a reminder, like the steady beat of the waves that crashed outside his sliding glass door, of time passing. He kept to his path, never turning back, his pace never slowing, not even at the sound of the gunshot, the fourth in little more than a week to echo across the canyon to points unknown, and beyond.

Epilogue

Seattle,
Washington

S
LOANE OPENED HIS
black binder, removed the envelope he had stuffed in the front pocket as he rushed out the door to court, and pulled out the photograph: Charles Jenkins knelt in a vegetable garden, Mount Rainier looming in the distance. Beside him stood Alex Hart, arms draped around his neck, her head on his shoulder. At their feet, tongue hanging out the side of its mouth, exhausted, was Joe Branick’s dog, Sam.

Having learned of Jenkins’s loss, Sloane had asked Aileen Blair for the dog. She gave it gladly. For himself, Sloane had asked for nothing, but it arrived two weeks later by special delivery anyway—the cardboard cutout of Larry Bird, the one her brother had loved. It now stood in the entry to their house, watching over all who came and went. Tina never complained.

Sloane had sold the apartment building, feeling that it was an appropriate way to bury his memory of Melda. He could no longer live there. He missed her terribly and knew he always would.

In the days following the summit, Aileen Blair spoke with Sloane frequently about her private meetings with Robert Peak. Ultimately the family had decided to let the investigation into her brother’s death end quietly, comforted by the knowledge that he had not taken his own life. She told Sloane that despite her own anger and desire that Peak be punished, she, too, knew that her brother loved his country and would not have wanted a national scandal to rip it apart. Even in death Joe Branick had done the right thing.