Divine Fury (20 page)

“So, here’s our story, our fabrication if you will,” he continued.
 
“A key campaign worker – we’ll call him ‘Adam’ – has quit in a huff.
 
Adam has information damaging to the campaign.
 
He is threatening to make it public and we are negotiating furiously to settle this, to buy his silence, in essence.
 
This story goes out through the normal channels.
 
I’ll send out an email this evening only to you four.
 
Tomorrow morning, Hillary distributes the information to the people she would normally let know about it.
 
At noon tomorrow, Salvatore does the same.
 
At 6 pm., it’s Sally’s turn.
 
The following morning, Lenny goes.

“The email has a name and telephone number for Adam.
 
Adam is actually a very close personal friend of mine who has no contact with the campaign and whom I trust completely to tell no one what we’re doing.
 
What we’re counting on is that when the leak occurs, they’ll rush to contact Adam while he’s still in play and hasn’t done anything – like sign a non-disclosure agreement – that would force him to keep quiet.
 
If I’m right, the timing of the approach should narrow the leaking to a handful of people – whether they’re doing it deliberately or not.”

“God, Harry,” said Lenny Salvuchi.
 
“Sounds like a goddamn spy novel.
 
But what if there is a bug in here?
 
Say, inside that phone sitting on the table there?”

“I had this room checked for that an hour ago,” said Blount.
 
“People who know about this stuff – the experts – say this room is clean.
 
I just hope they’re right.”

A half-hour after the meeting in the Bunker ended, Blount typed out the bogus email on his Thinkpad and sent it to the four others who had been in the room.
 
An hour later,
 
he’d just pulled into the driveway of the home he shared with Andrew Harper when his phone started beeping.

“It’s me,” said Adam Durant who had been Blount’s college roommate nearly two decades earlier.
 
“Someone just called.”

* * *

Monday, May 24, 2004
957 miles to San Francisco

Walberg knew he had more than two weeks to get to San Francisco.
 
So when he arrived at the Starlite Motel outside Rexburg in southern Idaho, he told the clerk in the office he’d be staying for a few nights.
 
 

He slept for two hours.
 
It was dark when he woke up.
 
He had a hamburger and a coffee at the restaurant next door and drove six miles further down the highway before he found a shopping center.
 
He bought a $13 pair of beautician’s scissors, a four-pack of disposable razors and three giant Snickers bars at Walgreens.

Back at the Starlite, Walberg turned on the television and found Rev. Jimmy Burgess’ Wednesday night program.
 
He pulled out a gallon Ziploc that had a couple hundred assorted pills.
 

At one point, he’d had seven different prescription bottles in his medicine cabinet.
 
Pills for seizures, depression, anxiety, sleep, too much sleep and a couple of problems he’d forgotten.
 
For a time, he’d put an assortment into a single bottle when he left the house and try to remember which ones to take at what times.
 
Before he left Bliss, he poured them all together into the Ziploc in a fit of disgust.
  

He had a vague recollection of what some of them did.
 
He knew the red ones slowed everything down.
 
The blue ones sped everything up.
 
The oval tablets gave him an out-of-body experience, as if he were watching himself from behind or something.
 
He swallowed a blue pill, an oval tablet and a brown capsule that he wasn’t sure he’d ever taken previously.
  
 

He listened through the opened bathroom door more to the cadence of the sermon than the actual words as he chopped his hair as close as he could with the scissors.
 
He filled the sink with the tufts of hair and then stuffed it all into the white wastebasket when he was finished with the scissors.
   

He studied his ragged butch cut in the mirror as he thought about the next step.
 
Then he turned on the faucet, cupped his hands and splashed water all over his head.
 
He took the shampoo out of the basket by the sink, put a blob in his palm and lathered it all over his scalp.
 
He pulled out the first razor, held the hair on his forehead back out of the way, and took off the first inch-long strip.
 
He went over it a couple of times to get all the hair.
 
Then, he rinsed the razor in the sink and went back for the next strip.

It took 20 minutes, all four razors and a half dozen bloody nicks before he was finished.
 
He used a handful of toilet paper to gather up the sodden mess in the sink and stuck it in the wastebasket.
 
He tore off a few small pieces of the toilet paper, twisted them and stuck them on the cuts to stop the bleeding.

Then, he studied himself again in the mirror, turning left, then right.
 
He practiced smiles and frowns.
 
He moved his eyebrows up and down.
 
They now seemed twice as thick and dark with his scalp shaved.
 
His pale baldness made his eyes seem much larger as well.
 
Walberg smiled at his ghoulish appearance.
 
It matched the way he felt – completely outside the normal world with its rules and politeness.
 
He’d severed those ties for good.
 

The drugs had kicked in hard and were affecting his vision.
 
He felt like he was seeing everything through a tunnel.
 
His heart was pounding.

Walberg turned to catch a final glimpse of himself before he switched off the bathroom light.
 
He turned so he could see his right profile, lightly pinching his chin and laughing at the new him.

Chapter 25

MASTER CHU EXTENDED his arms to his sides and shifted his weight to his right leg.
 
He lowered himself to the ground until his left leg stretched almost parallel to the ground with his foot outstretched.
 
Then, he slowly lifted himself and shifted positions until his weight was on the opposite side and he was almost a mirrored reflection of his earlier pose.
 
The tai chi imagery was that of a snake creeping through the grass.
 
The slowness of the movements were deceptive, though, since the inspiration for the postures are an initial retreat from an attacker, leading him to become unbalanced, and then a counterattack from below.

Lee matched his tai chi teacher’s movements as best he could.
 
The two of them were alone at tiny St. Mary’s Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown next to the statue of Sun Yat Sen as the first rays of morning sunlight warmed them.
 
Lee was wearing black sweatpants and a gray hooded sweatshirt.
 
Master Chu had on his usual 30-year-old sky-blue leisure pants with plenty of stretch to accommodate his movements and a navy-blue London Fog windbreaker.
 
What was left of his wispy white hair stuck straight out from his scalp as if it had a permanent charge of static electricity.

Chu was well into his 80s and Lee sometimes worried about how thin he was, although his strength and flexibility in their early-morning sessions made Lee feel clumsy next to him.
 
For the past four years, Lee had been alternating his morning runs with sessions with Chu.
 
He had come to appreciate both the focused relaxation of tai chi as well as the strength and balance the slow deliberate movements required.
 

A couple of years earlier, Lee had asked Chu to look in on his grandmother while he was out of town for an extended period.
 
Lee had been both amused and happy that they had become good friends with Chu taking a protective attitude toward his grandmother.
 
They both seemed less lonely now.
  

After 40 minutes of tai chi, Chu nodded to Lee that their session was at an end.
 
Chu gestured to Lee to follow him.
 
They walked together three blocks to a store on Jackson Street.
 
It had just opened for the day and the workers inside were cutting into boxes, setting up displays and clearing off the counters inside.

Chu had a quick discussion in Mandarin with one of the proprietors who disappeared for a moment in the back.
 
When he returned, he handed Chu a small, flat package in clear cellophane.

As Chu picked it up from the counter, Lee caught his arm so he could take a closer look.
 
Inside the package, he could see four smaller clear envelopes.
 
In each one was a small tan-colored scorpion about an inch long, curled in a circle.
 
They were obviously well dried.

“What exactly is that for?” asked Lee.

“For your grandma,” said Chu.
 
“She not sleeping good right now.
 
Use for tea.
 
Sleep good.”

Lee looked at him closely to make sure Chu wasn’t joking.
 
He wasn’t.

“So…uh…you’re sure about this, right?” asked Lee. “I mean those are scorpions.
 
Poisonous.
 
You don’t think that could hurt her?
 
Make her sick or something?”

Chu looked at him disdainfully.
 
He gestured back toward the man behind the counter who had retrieved the medicinal scorpions.
 
He was watching them with his arms folded across his chest.

“You think he give me this if it dangerous?” said Chu.

Behind the counter where the shop proprietor stood was a wall of brown drawers that reached from the floor to the ceiling.
 
On each was a white rectangular label with several rows of printed text listing whatever lay inside.
 
Next to the drawers were rows of large glass bottles filled with dried parts of plants – roots, seed pods, flowers.
 
It was all meticulously organized and labeled.
 
Lee thought it probably wasn’t much different than shelves of products a western pharmacy would have, minus a lot of elaborate packaging.

Lee knew many in Chinatown relied on the traditional Chinese medicine with its herbs and assorted animal parts – usually dried and ground up.
 
But his own mother had stuck with western medical treatment – yearly trips to the pediatrician with a heavy reliance on antibiotics for ailments.
 
Oh well.
 
Chu and his grandmother had made it into their 80s following their traditional practices.
 
Who was he to mess with that formula?

He walked with Chu another block to Portsmouth Square where the card players were just starting to form their huddled groups around the park benches.
 
In another hour, the place would be packed.

He and Chu sat on an empty bench in the sunlight.
 
Chu looked away for a moment.
 
Then he turned his gaze back on Lee.

“Something I must tell you,” he said.

“Okay,” said Lee.
 
“What is it?”

“Your grandmother and me,” he said.
 
“We get married.”