Thank You for Smoking (34 page)

"Not as good as the FBI's. Now
they
have sources."

"We're getting a hell of a lot of calls about this. Very, very angry calls."

"Yes, I can imagine what they must think." "Jeannette's office has fielded one hundred seventy-eight calls this morning."

"Jeannette's office?"

"We obviously can't refer calls about you to your office."

"No, no. Naturally. Well, Jeannette can certainly handle it. In fact, I appreciate Jeannette's abilities more and more each day. But I'm not sure that a leave of absence is a good idea."

"And why is that?"

"Because," Nick grinned, "it would send the signal that you all think I'm guilty. Which of course is not the case. Bight?" BR and Jeannette stared.

"I mean, the notion that I would cover myself with nicotine patches to the point of giving myself several heart attacks, and throw up a hundred times, and then leave the empty boxes all over the cabin for the FBI to find, once they were tipped off.
And
call the cabin from
my office phone on the morning I
abduct myself.
And
leave the number of the cabin right out in the open in my apartment. I mean, who would believe that a smart guy like me would be so FUCKING
STUPID
?!" Jeannette started.

"Sorry," Nick said. "Don't know what got into me. Anyway, I know my colleagues, my trench mates, my brothers- and sisters-in
-
arms, could never believe that I'd be capable of such ineptitude. So," he said brightly, "let's fight this all the way to the Supreme Court."

BR said, "Do we have a defense strategy'?"

"You bet. We're going to find the people who made me into the asshole."

"Do you have any idea who those might be?"

"Well," Nick said pensively, "they would have to be people who really despise me. But in my case that comes to about four-fifths of the U.S. population. Two hundred million. Sort of a big suspect pool, isn't it? You know, they'll probably be thrilled to see me get sent off to play love slave to the Aryan Brotherhood for ten to fifteen."

"I'm not sure it's going to come to
that,"
BR said. "We ought to be able to get you into some minimum-security place."

"Oh," Nick said, "I wouldn't count on it. Carlinsky says he's never seen prosecutors so pissed off. Evil yuppie scum devises cheap stunt to promote himself and cancer. He says they're out for blood." Nick grinned. "Mine."

"Well," BR said, leaning forward in a way suggesting that he was tired of badinage about Nick having to spend his next decade behind bars being gang-banged by people with swastika tattoos. "Carlinsky is the best,
and we are behind you. But I thin
k under the circumstances a leave of absence does make sense."

"Why don't we just run that by the Captain."

"I wouldn't trouble the Captain with this right now. This has all come as a terrible shock to him. He's not doing very well."

"He's
not?"
Nick said.

"No," BR said, with the faintest trace of a smile. "I'm afraid he isn't."

* * *

As soon as the door to BR's office closed behind him, Nick clashed to his office, only to find yellow
crime scene
tape on his door and several FBI technicians in jumpsuits with
fbi crime search team
in big, intimidating letters on the back. They were wearing latex gloves, and from the looks of it, ransacking every square inch of his office in the process, making it look like Nick's old room at college. God knows what they thought they were going to find in there, Nick thought— presumably a file in his computer labeled "
self-kidnap plan
. Things to bring to the cabin: 10 boxes NicArrest patches, rope, handcuffs
..."

"Is this necessary?" he said to one of the FBI technicians, who pointedly ignored him.

He took Gazelle aside. "Get me on the next flight to Winston-Salem."

"They said you weren't supposed to leave the metro area. Conditions of your bail."
"Gazelle."

"Is this going to make me an accessory?"

"All right, all right. Just look up the flights. Can your conscience handle that? I'll get the ticket myself."

He took the elevator down to I Street. A cab was parked, the driver, a Middle Eastern man with a close-cropped black beard, eating a knish from a sidewalk vendor. Nick waved him over and got in the back.

"National Airport. And hurry." It was unnecessary to say that
to any foreign-born
D.C. cab driver, since they only drive at two speeds, dangerously fast and really dangerously fast. Off they sped.

Nick looked out the rear window and saw a tan sedan with two athletic-looking types with sunglasses. Feds. The headline flashed before him.

Naylor Is Back in Custody After Violating Bail Terms

According to the license posted on the dash, the driver's name was Akmal Ibrahim.

"Mr. Ibrahim," Nick said, "are you in some sort of trouble with the FBI?"

"Why you say this?"

"Because you're being followed. That tan sedan. Those are FBI agents. I saw them watching you when you were parked."

Akmal looked nervously in the rear-view. "I have no problems with FBI."

"They seem to have some problem with you."

"Ever since World Trade Center bombing, FBI thinks all Muslim people are bad. Is not true. I have family in Reston."

"I know," Nick said. "It's awful the way they persecute people for their religious beliefs. I wonder what they want with you."

"I have nothing to worry."

"Why don't you take a sudden turn without a signal. See if they follow."

Akmal made a sharp turn onto Virginia Avenue at the last minute. The sedan swerved to follow, nearly colliding with a State Department staff car.

Akmal said worriedly, "They follow!"

"Yeah. You know, I saw them put something
in your trunk while you were eat
ing."
"What?!"

"It might have just been a listening device, but it might have been something else, like explosives. So they can arrest you for a bomber. I'm a reporter at the
Sun.
We've heard they're planning a big roundup of Muslims. They need hostages to trade with Saddam Hussein in case we go to war with him."

"But I have green card!"

"Well, good luck."

"FBI is arresting many wrong people. In New York they arrest people for the bombing, they are
not
the ones who do the bombing. The bombing is done by Israeli secret police, to make bad feelings about Muslim people in America."

"I know. It's awful. I'm writing a big article about it. But once they stop you and find whatever it is they put in your trunk, that's it, Akmal. That's how they got Sheik Omar, you know. And he's not getting out of prison until the twenty-second century."

"Sheik Omar is very holy man."

"Maybe they'll put you in the same prison. You and he could become friends."

Nick wondered, as he was forced back into his seat by the g-forces as Akmal hit the accelerator, if he had done a wise thing. There was a lot of honking and screeching of tires. When he opened his eyes and looked back, the tan sedan was fifty yards behind. Even highly trained government drivers are no match for the ordinary Middle Easterner.

By the time they'd reached the Arlington end of Memorial Bridge, Akmal had gained more yardage. Then, without any warning, he d
id a breathtakingly precise bootl
eg turn into the oncoming traffic, setting off an angry chorus of horns and anti-locking brakes. Nick was slammed into the side of the car.

"We lose them!" Akmal shouted triumpha
ntly
.

Nick peered cautiously through the rear window and saw the FBI sedan trying to catch up by speeding around the rotary in front of the cemetery. But by now Akmal had a couple of hundred yards on them. After another stunningly illegal turn, south onto Rock Creek, onto Independence, he did another 180-degree boodeg. Then it was back onto Rock Creek, right on Virginia, left onto Route 66, off at the Iwo Jima Memorial, left onto Route 50, and onto the George Washington Parkway south. Nick tipped Akmal fifty bucks and agreed with him that God was indeed great, then caught the flight to Charlotte, where he connected into Winston-Salem, arriving at the Bowman-Gray Medical Center after the Cardiac Care Unit visiting hours, making it necessary to adopt a rather broad southern accent as he told the head nurse that he was Doak Boykin III, uhge
ntly
come to see his deah old grandpappy.

"You're his grandson?" she inquired, a little suspiciously.

"Yay-ess," Nick said, sounding like Butterfly McQueen.

She peered at him. "You look familiar."

Doubtless, Nick's face had been prominently splashed across the front page of the
Tar-Intelligencer.

"They say ah look
jus
like him. May I please see him? Ah been so
wurried."

"Well," she said, "all right. But only ten minutes. He's very tired." "Is he gone to be all rayht?"

"Oh, he just likes to make us all worried. He'll be all right. If he
behaves"

The Cardiac Care Unit was top of the line, paid for with tobacco money, just another example of how tobacco and progress go hand in hand. The Captain was hooked up to a number of machines. In the semidarkness, their screens cast a cool glow of light onto the Captain's face, which seemed to Nick very pale and drawn. He stood next to the bed. "Captain?"

The old man's eyes opened, blinked a few times. "I
told
you," he said, "that I will not have any more pig parts put in me. I want
human
parts, damnit."

"Captain. It's me, Nick."

The Captain looked up.

"Why
son.
Sit down, have some oxygen."

"I came to explain to you. About the arrest."

"Yes," the Captain said, coughing. "It could use some explaining. BR called me in the middle of the night to say you were in custody."

"Thank you for the bail money."

"I don't suppose it'll bankrupt us. That Jewish lawyer fellow we hired you probably will, though. Four hundred and fifty dollars an hour . . ."

"This is going to sound a little strange," Nick said, "but here's what I think has happened."

Nick drew a breath and laid it out: BR wanted to fire Nick and replace him with his squeeze, Jeannette, but his appearance on the Oprah show had made him the Captain's gold-haired boy, and that had made BR jealous. The threatening caller on the Larry King show had probably given BR the brainstorm to kill two birds with one stone: remove Nick and drum up some sympathy for tobacco by creating a martyr. BR, who'd come up from the mafia-murky world of vending machines, would have had the connections to hire people to do it. But, to judge from the 'Executed for Crimes Against Humanity' sign, the kidnappers had screwed up by dropping him off on the Mall, still alive. So BR and Jeannette contrived to pm the kidnapping on Nick by having Jeannette seduce him and get his fingerprints all over the boxes of "condoms" and plant them in the cabin on the Virginia lake, along with a few other compromising clues. Nick would go to jail, disgraced, and BR's suspicion would turn out to have been correct, so he'd look like a hero. Of course, the real loser in all this was tobacco. . . .

Nick finished. The Captain looked at
him with lowered eyebrows,
took a long breath, and said, "You sound like one of those people who thinks there were five gunmen on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas that day."

"I know," Nick said. "It'll probably sound that way in court, too."

"On the other hand," the Captain said, pulling himself up in bed, "preposterous though it sounds, elements of it have a certain," he sighed, "ring to them that make my liver twitchy." He frowned. "BR's been telling me since the week after the kidnapping that he thought you were involved."

"Oh?" Nick said.

"And I have it from my own man in there that he and that blond gal Jurnelle—" "Jeannette."

"—have been making whoopee on company time. So that fits in with this conspiracy theory of yours. I know BR for a jugular fellow. You know, he wanted us to go public that your friend
Lorne
Lutch had taken the money fr
om
us."

"Why?"

"So he'd look like a whore and there'd be no Rancho Canceroso foundation. He never wanted us to pay him off. One conversation we had, he said, 'There are better ways to deal with people like that.' I wondered what he meant. You know, when I hired him away from Allied Vending, we were up to our armpits in liability suits, and I told him I'd pay him a bonus for every one that didn't make it to trial. And three of the big ones didn't make it to trial, on account of, you remember, they died from smoking in bed. BR made me pay him the bonuses even though those were accidents. Said a deal's a deal. Cost me plenty, too, though a hell of a lot less than it would have if we'd lost in court."