Presidential Deal (3 page)

The tall man sent his flashlight beam traveling over the weapon. “Interesting,” he said. “The rest of the items are inside there?”

Ray pushed another button, and the door began to grind back down. “You wish,” he said, giving the guy a smile of his own.

“What happens is, you give me the money, I give you the keypad. I drive out of here, and in about a minute or so, I call you on that phone I just gave you, tell you a code. You punch it in, then another one of these doors is going to open up.” He swept his arm toward the darkness behind them. “Then you walk in and get your badges, your uniforms, your sidearms.” He broke off, nodded in the direction of the door that had closed itself.

“You too can be Miami cops,” he said. “You want the tank gun, it’s another ten thousand.”

“And I am supposed to trust that you will do as you say,” the tall man said. “Just give you the money, let you drive away?”

Ray shrugged. “You don’t know me, I don’t know you, but I know the people who put you in touch. First thing, these people explained to you something like it was going to work, so this is no surprise. Second thing, I live here. I have to keep on doing business with these people. You think I’m going to screw with that for your little bit of money?”

The tall man considered it. He had another look at the uniform Ray was wearing, glanced at the stuff in the back seat of the Chevy. Finally, he nodded. He turned to the other two, made a gesture. They stepped back, stowing their weapons. The tall man took the briefcase from the top of the Chevy, handed it to Ray, who found it satisfyingly heavy. He riffled a couple of the packets at random. Twenties, through and through. He closed the case, tossed the keypad to the tall man who caught it against his chest.

“How about the tank gun?” Ray asked.

The tall man opened his palms at his sides. “It does not fit into our plans,” he said.

Ray pursed his lips. “I’d make new plans if it was me.”

“Thank you for the offer,” the tall man said.

“Sure,” Ray said. Too bad, but he would have no trouble finding a buyer. He was already edging away, moving backward, his eyes locked on the tall man. Nothing was going to happen, he thought, that didn’t begin with some word, some gesture from the
jefe
. That was the rule with sea worms. And as for the tall man, he didn’t seem dumb enough to try anything at this point, but, take all the precautions you want, you still had to keep your guard up.

“Just hang tight,” Ray said. “A minute or so.” And then he was gone.

***

Down the tight passage
between two of the mini-warehouses, over one chin-high fence, another passage so tight he had to move sideways, a quick right down an alleyway, then a left and over a block wall, he was moving as fast as one of the rats that loved the place, faster even, and he imagined the owl up there in one of the tall pines, watching him go, guy looking something like a cop with a briefcase banging his leg, one more quick turn and there was the big Suburban right where he’d left it, Ray jumping inside, screwdriver for a starter good as if he’d had a key, one straight run between the offices of an air-conditioning repair service and an appliance warehouse, big bilingual banner draped across the front, “E
XPORTAMOS
—W
E
E
XPORT
.”

“Me too,” Ray called out, the pedal of the big truck on the floor. He wondered briefly what a bunch of Salvadoran drug scammers intended to do with the stuff he’d delivered, but it wasn’t a major hold on his attention. It’d be some serious deal, of course, involving much more than what he’d take home from his night’s work, but the risk was so much greater. You might make a half-dozen drug scores just fine, but sooner or later your action would attract someone else’s action, and that wasn’t where Ray Brisa wanted to be. He’d found his niche.

In a city like Miami, being a thief was like taking up the civil service work of crime. Everybody expected to be stolen from, even the cops. Long as you didn’t actually hurt anybody while you were at it, they kept their attention directed at the murderers, and the serial grandmother rapists, and the drug runners who were into serious weight. There just wasn’t time for anything else.

Ray congratulated himself once again on this wisdom: Maybe he was not yet old enough to vote, nor to legally purchase a drink in the state of Florida, but at age twenty he had acquired a status and a security within it that would elude most of his peers all their lives. He swung the Suburban into a hard left turn, down a lane that would have seemed more like a walkway to anyone else.

It
was
a walkway, in fact, but Ray knew exactly how wide it was, and where it led, pity anyone using it to actually walk to work at this hour of the morning, though. He hit the berm of an elevated drain, and the right fender of the Suburban veered a few inches off course. The collision took a twenty-foot gouge out of the plaster wall on one side, and his correction was a bit too strong, sending the other fender into a slightly shorter furrow down the side of the building on the left.

He noticed the rich trail of sparks he left in his rearview mirror, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. Important thing, there were no headlights in his wake.

He nodded and turned back to his driving. A yellow barrier pole had been planted at the mouth of the far end of the passage. He must have been doing forty by the time the Suburban hit it, flattening it as if it were a wooden stake.

He was behind the south end of the warehouse complex now, barreling across a vacant parking lot and fishtailing up onto a grassy dike-top road that paralleled a broad canal. A hundred feet ahead was the gate to a bridge that only the water management people used, which he had jimmied earlier. On the other side of the canal was a similar gate that opened onto a lane that led into the streets of a development, and from there one-point-two miles to the entrance ramp of the Florida Turnpike.

He swung through the open gate, the Suburban’s tires roaring on the wooden bridge planks. At the top of the bridge’s incline, he hit the brakes, and the Suburban slid to a halt. Something rolled in the rear compartment, thudding into his seatback. Loose equipment, he thought, or maybe the briefcase, but then he remembered he’d tossed that into the seat on his right.

He’d secure whatever it was in a moment, for he had two more pressing items to attend to. First, make the call he’d promised; and then he’d give Luis and Zito exactly thirty more seconds to show up here at their planned rendezvous. After that, the plankton would be on their own.

He dialed in the number of the phone he’d left with the tall man, heard the connection make after the first ring.

“I am here,” the voice came.

Ray was scanning the open space between the warehouse complex and the canal, checking for signs of Zito and Luis.

“You’re going to be sorry, you didn’t take the tank gun,” Ray said.

“You have some numbers for me,” the voice said.

Ray knew the guy was over there in the middle of the warehouses, a mile or more from where he sat, but it sounded like he was right in the seat beside him. The cellular phones he was accustomed to stealing were often noisy, always cutting out in the middle of conversations, okay for free, but why did the people who paid for the things put up with such quality? he’d often wondered. This new digital technology seemed a major improvement, though. He would try to steal only those from now on.

“You see a couple of my people over there?” Ray said. “Big guy and a little guy?”

“I would like those numbers, my friend.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “Sure.” Not that he cared a great deal what happened to the sea worms, but he was curious now. “Punch six, six, six,” he spoke into the phone.

“Clever,” said the tall man.

“The way my mind works,” Ray said. He imagined he could hear the wheels of the warehouse door grinding upward. He was also thinking he’d have to give up on Zito and Luis, let them make their own way home.

“You see your door?” he said into the phone.

“Yes,” the tall man said. “It would seem as though it is working.”

“Then
hasta la vista
,” Ray said into the phone.

“
Hasta
,” was the tall man’s reply.

Ray cut the cell phone connection then. He took a last glance in the direction Zito and Luis might have come, then shrugged. He patted his briefcase, dropped the Suburban into gear, was about to ease on down the other side of the bridge when he remembered the thing sliding around loose in the back of the truck.

He flipped on the dome light, turned, stopped cold. The carpet in the rear compartment was glistening wet with something that looked like oil. He reached out his hand tentatively, felt it warm and sticky, knew what it was before he brought his fingers back into the light.

He wiped his hand quickly against the uniform shirt, raised himself so that he could see into the crevice between the front buckets and the platform. If he hadn’t been ready for it, the sight would have knocked him backward.

Skinny Luis down there, staring sightlessly back up at him, an impossibly big smile on his mouth. Impossible because it was his throat, in fact, laid open from ear to ear, or so it seemed to Ray, who was already pushing himself away, little sounds of fear popping involuntarily out of his gut like bubbles of awful gas.

He twisted back into his seat, his hands clamped on the wheel, gasping for breath.
Control, Ray, control
. Sure, it was a shock, seeing Luis like that, enough to scare anyone. But he was far away from the guys who’d done it. Just hit the gas, he told himself, zip right on through suburbia, those guys could never find him.
You’re cool, Ray, you’re just fine
…

…and then his eyes fell on the briefcase.

He could visualize the stacks and stacks of twenties inside, feel the satisfying heft of the thing…

…and suddenly he was clawing for the door handle at his side, jerking it so hard he snapped the pot-metal lever—cheap stuff they used despite the fact that these days a glorified van cost $40,000—because he’d somehow leaned on the automatic door lock button and had to hammer every goddamned thing on the armrest that looked like a control until he finally heard the little pneumatic
thunk
as the lock disengaged and he had the handle by its little nubbin, didn’t matter that he sliced his finger open doing it, he would have used his tongue on the ragged metal if he had to.

He jumped down from the cab, took one step, then two…

…and then the blast came and the door he’d tried to hurl shut came right back after him, slamming into him like the business end of a bus, taking him out over the canal, weightless as an astronaut…

…only it wasn’t an astronaut, it was Ray Brisa, thinking
fucking briefcase, fucking money
, hurtling through a soundless black sky like heading to another dimension, and then, finally, the wall of fire caught up and took everything.

Part 2: Campaign Trail

Chapter 3

“…I’ll have to admit, it wasn’t what I had in mind, Frank.” She had her gaze set out the window of the airy hotel penthouse. Blue skies, even bluer sea, a scattering of sailboats, toy-sized at this distance, free and glistening in the tropical sun. That’s where she wanted to be. Who wouldn’t?

“Why don’t you call me Mr. President,” he said, giving her his trademark grin. “It might remind you why you volunteered.”

His idea of a joke. She turned to watch him as he stepped into his trousers. Sure enough, one leg at a time, just like anyone else. Maybe she ought to bring in the photographers, let them snap away at Frank in his flopping boxers. It was the sort of thing that had once aided the presidency, wasn’t it: LBJ showing his scar, Gerald Ford clonging his bald head on an airplane wing?

“But you’re going to miss it. It’s right up your alley,” she said. “Cops, soldiers, derring-do.” She noted that he sucked in his breath before he snapped the waist button of his slacks. A damned shame. You could be chief executive and your waistline still be beyond your control. Not that she had any room to talk, of course. She’d paid twelve hundred dollars for the suit she was wearing, and if the wall of mirrors behind her husband was to be trusted, about a thousand dollars’ worth of the fabric was stretched over her behind.

Frank disappeared into the bathroom, pulling his shirt on, and she turned, trying another angle, trying to convince herself it was just the way the light struck the fabric. There was a knock at the bedroom door and she glanced at her watch. One of the aides, she thought, hurrying them along. “They’re baying at the door, Frank…” she began, and then the door flew open.

“I don’t give a damn what Malcolm Jesse says,” the first man through the door was saying. It was Larry Chappelear, who’d been with Frank from the beginning, the man who’d helped transform him from a professor of political science into a state representative, a governor, and ultimately a president. They’d all been classmates at Mizzou together, once upon a time.

The normally placid Chappelear was red-faced now, nearly shouting at John Groshner, Frank’s special advisor, who was coming through the doors on Larry’s heels. While Larry had been with them since forever, Groshner had come aboard in Washington last year to help lay the groundwork for this campaign. Larry was down-home, even rough about the edges, and, while forthright, a strategist who preferred to play behind the scenes. Groshner was Ivy League through and through, stern but brilliant, a Beltway insider who loved the spotlight. Frank didn’t care for Groshner’s style, either, but she knew he trusted the man’s brutal instincts, counted on him for the ruthless take on things, something Frank worried that Missouri politics had not prepared him for sufficiently, even to this day.

“Getting in bed with these people is like taking a hum job from a rattlesnake…” Larry was saying to Groshner. He broke off when he noticed Linda staring at him.

“Sorry,” he said, glancing about the room. “Where is he?”

“In the bathroom, Larry. Do you mind…?”

Chappelear didn’t hesitate. He was through the open door before she could get another word of protest out.

“You can’t do this, Frank,” he was saying.

“I can’t take a leak?” she heard Frank call back.

“Forget Florida…” Chappelear continued.

Groshner hesitated, gave Linda a look that was supposed to be apologetic, then barged into the bathroom after Chappelear. “He can’t forget Florida. Not if he wants to be president…”

“He
is
the president,” Chappelear called out. “How do you think he got there?”

“Stop it!” Linda heard Frank cry over the sound of the toilet flushing. “Both of you!”

She saw Groshner backing out of the bathroom, followed by Larry, both of them being driven along by Frank, who was zipping himself up. He glanced at Linda, shaking his head. “You believe this?”

She shrugged. She’d come to believe just about anything over the past four years. She was just happy she’d had her clothes on.

“It’s a mistake, Frank. You can set a major precedent here—” Chappelear began again.

“And become the first president to shoot himself dead in front of the American public.” Groshner broke in.

Frank closed his eyes, held up his hands for quiet. “The matter’s been decided.” he said.

“But, Frank…”

Frank opened his eyes, shaking his head, holding a finger to his lips. “I said ‘decided,’ Larry. Now both of you, get out of here and let me finish getting dressed.”

Groshner flashed a smile of triumph, but Frank didn’t acknowledge it. He clapped Chappelear on the shoulder, met his hangdog look. “We’ll make this work, Larry.”

Chappelear started to say something else, but saw the set of Frank’s chin. He nodded quietly then, and went out the door after Groshner.

Frank went to the door, examined the knob. He turned back to Linda. “No lock,” he said. “Amazing.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “Groshner could ooze in through the cracks.” She knew how Larry Chappelear felt, after all. He’d spent a dozen years at Frank’s side, helping him hone policies that were both humane
and
workable. Larry, who’d written his dissertation on Latin American politics, had won the admiration of commentators and politicians on both sides of the floor for his work to extricate the country from entanglements with the sleazier of those regimes, to embark upon more enlightened policies in the region. Now, here he was, faced with the prospect of seeing all his work obviated by Groshner, pragmatist extraordinaire.

“That’s not fair, Linda. John’s got a point of view, but…”

“He’s an android,” she said. “They don’t think, they’re programmed.”

“Are you going to grind me about this meeting, too?” he asked. His voice had risen a notch. He looked at her as if he might suddenly be wondering where to place her: for him or against him. This could be his last battle, except for maybe where to build the library to house his presidential papers, she understood that much. But she also worried that the point of waging the war in the first place had been lost a long time ago.

She shook her head. “You need to do what you think is best,” she said. She managed a wan smile. “I’ll do my part. Just tell me where to go, who I’m supposed to do it to.”

He gave her a look meant to convey gratitude, though perhaps it was just relief. “It’s the same goddamned drill, Linda,” he said. “Pretend it’s the Daughters of the American Teapot Association or the Homeless People of the Mississippi Delta, something you’re interested in.”

She knew he was trying to joke, but it still came off as a dig. “Maybe you can do it that way,” she said. “I can’t.”

He rolled his eyes, struggling with a cuff link. Twenty-two years in political life, he still couldn’t get a cuff link in place. She stepped forward, took hold of his sleeve, guided the nub through the tiny embroidered holes.

A set of cuff links she’d bought him once, she realized as she smoothed the fabric of his shirt. Tiny fishing flies under amber-cast domes. For an instant, she saw him as he had been in his twenties, when they were both graduate students, she on a Fulbright to Oxford, he come over for a summer exchange program at Cambridge. They’d tramped Wordsworth country together, picnics, fly-fishing, lovemaking in fields of daisies. Yes, her heart
had
leapt up.

She took his other sleeve, held her hand out for the other cuff link, took care of that one as well.

He nodded his thanks, she gave him a smile. They could be out there on that glistening bay, she thought. He casting, she reading a book. Sure. It could happen. In about four and a half years, in fact. Four years sooner, if the election were to be lost. A distinct possibility, if Malcolm Jesse, the gloomier of their in-house pollsters, were to be believed. That was what Larry and Groshner were really wrangling about: those distressing figures and what might be done about them.

“Linda,” her husband said, in his famous aggrieved but patient tone. “When Groshner talked me into doing this thing in Miami, I didn’t think there was a chance in hell of making any inroads with the Cubans. But if they want to talk, then I’d be a damned fool not to talk.”

Until yesterday, there’d been no prospect of inroads, no meetings with exile leaders, nothing but the standard photo opportunities and the Medal of Valor ceremony, a pleasant enough event, but politically insignificant: there was a fundraiser attached, and there would be several hundred party faithful in attendance, but for Frank it would be like preaching to the choir. He’d been morose, worried that the whole trip had been wasted: why hadn’t they stayed in the Midwest, worked harder on Ohio…

…and then Groshner had come in with the news: Jorge Alejandro Vas, archconservative leader of the Cuban exile community and longtime pretender to the presidency of a liberated Cuba, had agreed to meet with Frank after all. Vas was the man who could deliver Florida. That was the thinking, at least. To meet with Vas meant that Frank would need a replacement for the Medal ceremonies, though, and that’s where Linda had come in.

“I’m happy to stand in,” she said, though she knew her tone didn’t exactly support the statement. “But I’d still like to know what John told Mr. Vas in order to arrange this meeting.”

“What does it matter? The point is, I have the opportunity to try to talk some sense into the man.” He gave her the sincere look that all the reporters loved. But they didn’t live with the man. When he used it on her, it meant he was being less than forthcoming.

“Tell me the truth, Frank. What do you have to give up?”

He was checking his cuff links again. “That’s not the way I do things, Linda. You know me better than that.”

“You’re going to undo all of Larry Chappelear’s work just to get this man’s blessing?” She was well aware that Chappelear had been campaigning from the moment they’d arrived in Washington to soften the U.S. stance toward Cuba, to open meaningful negotiations there. There’d been more talk recently, vague references to the “new strategy” down there, and she knew something was in the works, though she hadn’t asked Frank and he hadn’t volunteered any information. That was just fine with her; her interest in the intricacies of Latin American political affairs rated right up there with flower arranging. But in this case, she sensed her husband being whipsawed. And
that
was something she took an interest in.

He glanced up at her. “I’m not going to undo a thing. I’m going to point out to Mr. Vas that he’s got a hell of a lot more to gain by allying himself with the inevitable process of rational policy-making than by getting in bed with an opportunist like Charles Hollingsworth.”

“Good luck,” she said. “From what I’ve heard, I don’t think Vas understands the word ‘rational.’”

Frank rolled his eyes at her, but he didn’t respond. Partly because he wasn’t interested in having this fight, partly because deep down he shared her feelings about the far right.

Still, he was going into a meeting where he would have to make nice with an ultraconservative power broker who would not merit five minutes of their time in any other context. Thank God it was Frank, she thought. Thank God it was he who had to cover and compromise and concede every day of his life. She knew what was required but had never become comfortable with it. Oh, at first, perhaps. When it was still local politics, nothing that mattered outside Missouri, and nothing much in Missouri that everyone didn’t feel basically the same about, or so it seemed in relation to the way things were in Washington.

Nearly four years in Washington later, she’d finally come to understand the true meaning of politics. Now all she could think about was getting out, and Frank just as desperately wanted four more. Not that any man wouldn’t, not that she had ever expected otherwise. She could understand that, but at what price to
her
soul, that was the question she’d been wrestling with, though she understood how presumptuous it would seem to share such a thought with anyone.

Get a grip
, she told herself.
You are the wife of the president of the United States. Get a grip. You do not have feelings of doubt, insecurity, hesitation, depression, or yearning for a life other than the one you have. Give anyone the idea that any such thoughts have so much as passed through your mind and…well…look at the field day the media had had with Fergie, Diana, Pat Nixon, with Hillary, for God’s sake
…she realized that she had drifted off, that Frank had taken the opportunity to move away from the subject of Vas and what Groshner had or hadn’t intimated.

“…think you’re going to enjoy this, Linda,” Frank was saying, shrugging into his suit coat. “All these people are heroes. They get their pictures in
Parade
magazine, they inspire others, they stand for all the worthy values.”

“They’re probably all huge,” she said. “I’ll have to stand on a box to get the things over their necks.”

“There’s a lady cop from Oakland,” he said. “Second-generation Vietnamese-American. She pulled ten people out of a hotel fire. I’ll bet she’s not an inch over five feet, probably goes about a hundred pounds.”

She nodded. “I never said it wasn’t a worthy occasion, Frank.”

“There are all kinds of people,” he said. “One guy’s from Miami, some kind of contractor who saved all those Cuban folks out in the Gulf Stream.”

She nodded vaguely. Lady cops, heroic building contractors, local SWAT team members. Not that she didn’t appreciate their good works, not that she was unaware that they were capable of greater acts of courage than she would ever be capable of…it was just that behind every Herculean deed was a story of human tragedy, and even if it was, in these cases, tragedy aborted or averted, she was not entirely consoled. For every good work, for every heroic act, how many tragedies had gone forward unimpeded, how much cruelty had been gleefully and freely expended, how many evil intentions had been carried out undeterred?

Loony to see things this way, she could not argue with that, and she had never been one to see her glass as half empty. But perhaps that was the toll the office had taken upon her, even her slight part in it. She’d heard others talk about it, how many fine men had come to Washington, full of the best of intentions, only to find that the immense Leviathan that was the entrenched bureaucracy had been steaming along for years, its course unaffected by any single captain’s will—and it would continue to be that way long after she and Frank were gone.