The President's Henchman (25 page)

“So he has to be stopped before he can pitch his tent.”

“Just so.”

“And you called me because?”

“You love the president more than anyone. You’re also uniquely suited, in my view, to confront Roger Michaelson. And because your ass is also on the line.”

All of which McGill agreed with, but Galia had left one thing unsaid.

“It had to kill you to ask me for help, didn’t it?” McGill asked.

“At first, but I’ve gotten over it.”

“A true professional. So what’s your plan, Galia? What do you want me to do?”

She told him.

McGill said no.

“But —” Galia began.

“No,” McGill repeated. Then he came up with his own idea. “You got the part about taking the fight to him right. But no cameras. Any publicity at all could bring the circus to town. What I know about the guy, what I remember, is that he was a college basketball star.”

“What’s
that
got to do with anything?” Galia asked.

Her plan had been to have McGill confront/ambush the senator in a public forum where there were TV cameras. That would focus attention on McGill and Michaelson. But McGill was right, Galia could see now, damn him. The story would get too big to be limited to the two of them. The flood tide of media attention would inundate the Oval Office, too.

“I’ll bet he still plays ball,” McGill told her. “Find out where. See if you can learn anything about his game.”

This macho nonsense was almost more than Galia could stand, but she lacked a better idea.

“If you’re not up to getting this information, Galia, I’ll put Sweetie on it. Her reputation is at stake here, too.”

“I can do it,” the chief of staff asserted. “Better and with less notice than anyone else.”

“Good, then do it,” McGill said. “And, Galia?”

“What?”

“I appreciate how well you look after the president. I’m sorry about the donuts.”

“Too late for that,” she snapped, and broke the connection.

Deke and Leo stood at a respectful distance, looking at McGill. The three Air Force officers watched him from the doorway to the cockpit. None of them said a word. Just waited to hear what his pleasure might be.

“Tower needs a flight plan?” McGill asked the pilot.

“It helps traffic move smoothly, sir.”

McGill grinned. “Tell them we’re bound for Andrews AFB. With a stop on the way at Gambier, Ohio.”

The pilot saluted. “Yes, sir.”

He and the copilot strapped into their seats and began chattering with control tower and each other. Unsolicited, Bart Burley brought him a White House ice tea. Leo took his seat and began writing in a notebook; his memoirs would be worth reading, too, McGill thought.

He waved Deke over to sit next to him. “I suppose you can talk to anyone in the world — or on Mars, for that matter — from this plane.”

“On earth, yes. On Mars, I’d have to check.”

“Good. What I’d like you to do is find the name and the phone number of the Honolulu chief of police for me. When you have that information, let me know, and I’ll call the man.”

“I’ll call him for you.”

McGill shrugged.

Deke went to work. Getting the name and phone number took less than a minute. Calling him and having him pick up, maybe thirty seconds.

“Chief Patrick Manuala?” Deke asked. “This is Secret Service Special Agent Donald Ky calling from Air Force 1-A …”

So that’s what they call my plane, McGill thought.

“… Please hold for retired Chief of Police James J. McGill.”

Sounded better than Gumshoe McGill, McGill thought. Established professional bonds. He nodded his approval to Deke as he took the phone.

“Hello, Chief,” McGill said. “How are you?”

A round of pleasantries followed, then McGill got down to business. He asked for copies of any reports and photos the HPD might have concerning the accidental hang-gliding death of tourist Michael Raleigh. He gave Chief Manuala the date Chana’s ex had lost his life.

The Hawaiian cop was only too happy to comply. Said he’d have the file FedExed out that night. With a laugh, he added it would be the first time he’d ever sent anything to the White House. McGill didn’t spoil his fun by asking that the material be sent to his P Street office.

Chief Manuala invited him and, of course, the president to come visit his beautiful island as soon as they could. McGill said he’d speak with the president about it.

Then the chief asked if it would be all right to ask a favor.

“Sure,” McGill told him.

“I’m a big fan of the president. Voted for her, you know. I was wondering, you think I could get an autographed picture?”

McGill smiled. “That I can promise. Made out to you?”

“The Manuala family. I want it for home, not an office trophy photo.”

That made McGill feel even better.

“I’ll make a call,” he said. “If the president has a spare moment, it’ll go out tonight.”

“Mahalo and aloha,” the chief said.

McGill broke the connection just as the Gulfstream surged into the air.

He wasn’t surprised that he could use the phone during a takeoff.

He started making calls to the other boyfriends on Chana Lochlan’s list. All of them were willing to talk. Eager even, as Graham Keough had been. All of them had nicknames for Chana, too —
Gorgeous
being the most common. But none of them admitted to calling her Gracie.

Chana Lochlan lay naked on her bed, sleeping peacefully. Damon Todd sat naked on a chair next to the bed, staring at her, an erection projecting from his crotch. He could take her anytime he wanted. All he needed to do was utter a posthypnotic prompt, and she would welcome him into her body, wrap her arms and legs around him, kiss him as deeply as if he were her personal Prince Charming. But he just couldn’t say the words.

Because he loved her. Because she’d helped define him as much as he’d helped define her. But she was changing, quite independently of his ministrations.

He stood and walked over to a full-length, three-panel mirror set in a corner of the room. The looking glass was normally kept in Chana’s dressing area, but he’d brought it into the bedroom for That night’s session. By the soft radiance of a night-light that still glowed on the reflective surfaces, he’d had Chana stand before the mirror and tell him who she saw.

He’d expected her to say “Nan.”

She’d said, “I don’t know.”

Chana had always wanted to be the older sister she’d never known in life. She’d projected an image of perfection on Nan — aided by her mother, who’d always done the same. It had never occurred to Chana that although Nan had been beautiful, she’d been fatally flawed. Else, why had her cruel disease carried her off at such a young age? But people tended to overlook even obvious facts when they contradicted their preconceptions.

But Chana was changing.

When Chana had been brought to him for help after she’d nearly died in California, it had taken only two therapy sessions for her to admit she wanted to be like Nan. Given all the execrable role models a young person could have emulated, Todd found Chana’s choice touching. Pure. He’d been conducting his experiments in crafting personalities for five years by then, but only in piecemeal ways. Improving one subject’s punctuality. Getting another over socially debilitating shyness. Smoothing out a stutter that speech therapists had been unable to correct.

He’d provided such help at the college health-services facility
pro bono.
His only compensation had been sexual access to the females he’d found attractive. A fee he’d kept entirely to himself. Standing before the mirror, he watched his erection droop.

Chana had fallen in love him when he’d told her, several sessions into her therapy, that she could not only be like Nan, but he could help her
become
Nan. The prospect had been so thrilling to her that she’d embraced him fiercely. She was regaining a good deal of her strength by then, and he … he was nowhere near the man he was now.

In fact, it had been the sheer physical might he felt flow from her that had inspired him to change. He’d always been slight of build, but at that moment he wanted to be strong. Very strong. Worthy of the woman he was sure would become his greatest creation.

It would be years before the term
anorexia athletica
came to be coined, but he knew from his workup and sessions with Chana that she was seriously addicted to exercise. So he foresaw that in patterning himself after his patient, he would be taking the risk of falling into the same trap. He wasn’t worried, though. He was a professional. He could walk up to the edge and not fall into the abyss. The element of danger only added to the appeal of his new plan.

In the end, however, he did fall. Indeed, he had
wanted
to fall.

The most common body dysmorphia that seized males was called
bigorexia
. It was the polar opposite of
anorexia nervosa.
The sufferers of
bigorexia
obsessed about being small and underdeveloped. Even if they had good muscular development, they saw themselves as ninety-seven-pound weaklings. In pursuit of ever larger and more muscular physiques, they could not and would not stop their compulsive exercising and their abuse of steroids. Not even when they understood the destructive consequences of their actions.

Todd’s obsession skewed from that pattern. His self-diagnosis was
riporexia.
He strived not for size but the complete definition of every muscle fiber in his body. He wanted to see every strand of protein when he stood nude in front of a mirror. He wanted to be ripped as no one had ever been ripped. That meant his body had to be stripped of all fat above the bare minimum necessary to sustain life.

He had realized that his body was simply the metaphor for his identity. But as long as there was any ambiguity in his psyche — and there was more than he’d ever admit — he thought that the continuing act of defining himself physically would lead him to a complete understanding of who he truly was.

But having become a physical specimen unlike any other, he had cause to doubt his entire hypothesis. Just as he had to doubt that Chana, of her own volition, had ever really cared for him. He returned to the chair next to the bed and resumed looking at her. Dispassionately.

She had been the first subject whose personality he’d remade entirely. With her eager assistance, of course. She’d been the first one he’d given Special K. He’d read about the drug’s effects before he’d ever used it on any of his patients. He’d even done first-person observations of users, sometimes going so far as to provide the money that the recreational druggies used to buy their ketamine hydrochloride.

The fieldwork confirmed the findings reported in the literature. Users of a certain quantity and concentration of the drug all but unanimously reported near-death experiences: going into the K-hole. He had reasoned that his subjects could go into the K-hole as one personality and come out reborn as another.

The preparation for such a drastic change had to be painstaking and willingly entered into by the subject, but he was certain it would work.

And it had. Chana had become Nan. Nan was reborn twenty years after she had died. Nan knew that to keep up appearances she had to masquerade as Chana. But that was a small price to pay for being given a second chance at life.

Similarly, a large number of his other subjects became new, if covert, personalities. Crafted personalities. College towns had been fertile recruiting grounds for his work. Early on, he’d thought about going public with his work, but anytime he’d even hinted to colleagues about an interesting new
theory
he was thinking about, he’d been uniformly rebuked.

Unethical. Immoral. Playing God.

So he’d kept his work secret. But privately, he had been quite proud of what he was doing. It was amazing really. He took young people of promising but conflicted natures and helped them to find their most productive selves. The percentage of his subjects who’d gone on to lead lives of substantive achievement was nothing short of astounding. His subjects had become important figures in business, government, and the arts.

And all he’d asked in return was that they welcome him whenever he dropped in to see them. The nature of that welcome varied with the individual. Women provided him with their warmth. Men provided him with financial help. Everyone greeted him with a smile.

Except that when he’d phoned Chana not long ago, she hadn’t even known who he was. Chana, whom he loved.

He put his clothes on — sweats and sneakers — as he continued to look at her. Was Chana starting to assert her own identity, he wondered, and was Nan beginning to recede? In their original therapy sessions, Chana had told him that her mother, Marianne Westerly, was the one who had originally insisted her second daughter be just like her first, or as she imagined Nan would have become had she lived. Parents were, after all, the original craftsmen of their children’s lives.

The pity of it was that so many of them did the job so badly.

Chana’s father, Eamon Lochlan, had loved her unconditionally for who she was. Or so Chana had reported to him, and he had no reason to doubt her. Her only complaint about her father had been that he too readily deferred to her mother. Which made it understandable that Chana’s desire to become her sister, inspired by her mother’s urging, had come to the fore. Todd knew that Chana/Nan’s parents had divorced long ago, but had some new dynamic been introduced to draw Chana closer to her father of late? If so, that might be the reason for this confusion of identity.

He thought it would be a good idea to investigate. Pay a visit to Professor Lochlan in Ohio. While the CIA continued its endless dithering about his work.

He pulled the covers up around his beloved. If she wanted to go back to being Chana, he would help restore her to that identity. He would do so and depart from her life. Maybe forgetting all about his current plans and looking for something new to make of himself.

“Sleep well, my dear,” he told her. “When you awaken, you will be refreshed. If you don’t know exactly whom you want to be, you will at least see the first steps you should take.”

He turned and started for the front door.

Celsus Crogher grabbed the guy outside of Chana Lochlan’s town house.

He said, “Secret Service, put up a fight, and I’ll break your neck.”

Daryl Cheveyo grunted, “CIA, and I’d like my neck intact, if you don’t mind.”

“CIA?” Crogher repeated, not letting go of his neck lock. “My ass.”

Doing his best to stay calm, Cheveyo said, “I can show you my ID … or we can exchange secret code words.”

Crogher didn’t like wiseguys. He was out there on his own, eyeballing a reporter’s residence because that dickwad McGill had sicced him on her. Without telling him the nature of the threat. Thereby creating the possibility of failing at his job, a job in which failure was unacceptable. If possible, the situation had rendered his disposition more grim than usual.

Then this joker had come along and taken up a perch in a shadow between two buildings, directly opposite the Lochlan address and mere feet from the stairway with the wrought-iron risers under which Crogher had lodged himself an hour earlier.

At first, Crogher thought maybe the guy was a well-dressed street criminal. A mugger or a burglar in a nice suit, looking for an unwary late-night pedestrian or a vulnerable house to enter. But then a dog of some size had come charging up on the other side of the metal latticework gate that stood between the two buildings.

The dog started to act territorial, giving the guy a low menacing growl. Before it could open its yap and bark out loud, the guy turned, not a feather ruffled, and gave it a blast of spray. Not pepper. That would have sent the animal running off yowling and howling. Whatever he used had put it right down. Good night, pooch.

Crogher didn’t know if the canine was dead or just unconscious. Either way, he wasn’t happy. He liked dogs. Especially guard dogs. He identified with them. So when the guy saw that the dog was down for the count and turned to look back at the Lochlan house, Crogher duckwalked out of his hiding place and jumped him.

“Did you kill that dog?” he asked.

“Don’t think so,” Cheveyo said. “Unless, of course, he had a bad heart. Look, my neck’s starting to hurt. I’m here at the direction of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. Do I really need to threaten you with the consequences you’ll face if you keep fucking with me?”

“Your boss can beat up my boss? I don’t think so. I work for the president.”

Made Crogher feel good to say that.

“You’re in the White House detail?”

“I
run
the White House detail. I’m the SAC.”

“And the president sent you to watch that house across the street?”

“Her husband did,” Crogher grumbled.

That didn’t make him feel good at all.

“James J. McGill sent you to watch Damon Todd?”

“Who?” Crogher asked.

Cheveyo stiffened, then whispered, “ Him.”

Crogher saw a truly strange-looking man come out of Chana Lochlan’s town house.

“Step back,” Cheveyo murmured. “Don’t let him see us.”

Without letting go, Crogher moved them back into deeper shadow.

The figure moved off down the street at a lope, apparently unaware he had been observed. Crogher watched him go, and asked, “What’s up with that guy?”

“He likes to work out.”

“So do I, but Jesus.”

“He also wants to go to work for the Company. You think you can let me go now?”

Reluctantly, Crogher did.

Cheveyo rubbed his sore neck. “I’m going to show you who I am, so don’t go crazy on me.” He brought out his photo ID.

Professional etiquette required Crogher to respond in kind.

“Can’t be a coincidence we’re both looking at the same house,” he told Cheveyo, “even if we’re looking at different people. What’s this musclehead who wants to work for you do?”

Cheveyo smiled sourly.

“You know, I’d really like to tell you, even if you did almost break my neck.”

“But you’re not going to.”

“That’d make things too easy for government work. If it’s any consolation, I’ve already recommended that my boss pass along the information to your people.”