“Who does? They say anything on TV about the president’s choice?”
“All this time I think you just gettin’ some nookie on the sly, and turns out you’re up to your ass in shit with that rich bitch. What’s this about going away?”
“You had anything to eat today?”
“Don’t brush me off, goddamnit! The feds are going to swarm us both and send us so far up the river we won’t get out for a hundred years. And I’m takin’ the ride not even knowin’ what the fuck went down. Shows you how fuckin’ smart I am! You keep tellin’ me I’m your friend and you don’t tell me shit.”
“What do you want me to say? There are two dozen bodies spread all over the East Coast, and we’re trying to figure out who and why. You think I know?”
“You know more than me, and that’s a fact. Goddamn, Carmellini, it was me those assholes carved up. I’m gonna carry the scars all my miserable life. Don’t all that blood buy me some truth?”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before I answered. “The truth is I don’t know what’s going down. I just pray to God that Jake Grafton does. If he doesn’t, we’ll share a cell someplace.”
“I ain’t sharin’ nothin’ with you ever again,” Willie declared. “You in the same prison with me, you’re a dead man, Carmellini.”
He meant it, too — I could see that. “Maybe you should go home,” I suggested.
He didn’t say anything to that for at least a minute. I could see he was thinking it over. After a while he muttered, “I go home, they’ll arrest me before the goddamn sun sets. I’ll stay.”
I turned up the sound on the monitor. This guy thumping the podium was a fire-breather.
“And I don’t want to hear any more shit ’bout you savin’ my life,” Willie said, “like I owe you somethin’ and ain’t payin’. You’re the one sicced those assholes on me. You owe me, man, not the other way ’round.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“The president will speak in about twenty minutes,” Callie told her husband, who was looking out the window. She was adding the final items to an overnight bag. “Do you want to stay to hear what he has to say?”
“No. Doesn’t matter.”
“Is going to New York really a good idea?”
“Maybe not, but it’s the best one we have — the only one we have — so we’re going to run with it.”
He glanced at the television. On this channel a panel of “experts” was debating why the president would or wouldn’t choose to run with his wife, Zooey Sonnenberg. In an upper corner of the picture was a smaller picture in which the governor of some Midwestern state was addressing the convention delegates, who weren’t paying any more attention to him than the panel of experts were.
A wry grin crossed Jake Grafton’s face; this was, he reflected, the Americans’ freedom of speech in full flower. Card-carrying members of the chattering class were talking, exercising their constitutional right to say whatever they wished, and no one was listening.
He carried the overnight bag down the stairs and set it by the door.
He was about to ascend the stairs again to check on Goncharov when someone rapped on the front door.
He opened it and found a soldier in full camo wearing grease paint and carrying a short submachine gun on a strap over his shoulder. “Just thought I’d drop by, Admiral, and tell you we’re leaving now.”
“You are? Now?”
“Just got the orders, sir. They said you were leaving shortly so we were to pull out ASAP.”
“Thank you, major. We are indeed leaving shortly.”
“Any time, Admiral. It’s been good training. Sorry about that villain last week.”
“Right.” Jake stood in the doorway and watched the captain go. His men sifted out of empty houses and hides and joined him as he walked under the streetlight toward the highway.
The sound of loud rock music drowned out the sounds of traffic and surf tonight. It seemed to be coming from a house three doors closer to the beach, on the south side of the street. Cars filled every parking place.
Jake closed the door as Callie and Goncharov came down the stairs. “I think something is about to happen here,” Jake said as he reached for the MP-5 Carmellini had stashed in a corner. “Come with me, now.”
They followed him out the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing,” Jake said. “The helo is supposed to pick us up at midnight and take us to New York. The general didn’t mention that he was going to pull the security people away, but they all left. Called off, the major said.”
“Why don’t you call the general?”
“I will. In the meantime I think we should get out of the house.”
Moving quickly, they walked under the light past the party into the darkness beyond. Jake told Callie to hide with the archivist under the derelict building near the beach, the one in which Carmellini had killed the rifleman. They disappeared over the boardwalk. Jake lay down in the sand beside a fence on the yard of the last house on the north side of the street, which was empty just now.
Yesterday a pack of college-age youngsters had loaded the garbage cans in front of the party house, packed their cars, and departed. Another bunch had arrived today. Tonight they were settling in.
There was a shrub of some kind at the end of the fence. Jake shoved the nose of the silenced submachine gun between the shrub and the fence and pointed it at the junction of this dead-end street and the highway, then lay down to wait. Fortunately this yard was slightly elevated, so he could see over the hoods of the cars parked on the street.
There was not enough light to see the keys of his cell phone. Still, he managed to get the general on his second dialing attempt.
I watched the president’s acceptance speech on the monitor in mission control, surrounded by computers, radio and television receivers, and the remnants of sandwiches, potato salad, and pickles from a deli down the street. Willie had stopped his grousing and watched without comment.
The president wore a dark suit and burgundy power tie. He was carefully made up and used the TelePrompTer with obvious skill. He recited the accomplishments of his first term and laid out the goals for his second, the themes he wanted to run on. He denounced the dogs in the other party who had impeded his legislative program and stymied some of his judicial nominations.
It was a tub-thumping political speech, just what the pundits and everyone else expected him to say. Made you wonder if there were any good movies on the cable channels. Near the end of the speech, he got around to the subject that had consumed the delegates all week, the identity of his vice-presidential running mate.
“This party needs a woman on the ticket,” the president declared, “a competent, capable, highly intelligent woman. This nation wants a woman on the ticket who understands the goals and aspirations of the American people and is ready to assume the burdens of the presidency in an emergency.”
Apparently the prospect of his demise was merely “an emergency.” That wasn’t the word I would have chosen. Which is why he’s a politician and I’m a thief.
“This party and this nation,” he continued, “are ready to put behind us the tired, obsolete, bigoted ways of the past and step into the future, a future where all Americans, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or gender”—here he paused to thunderous applause—“have an equal opportunity. The time has come. We must carry the torch forward into the future, lighting the way for all the people of the earth. Our time has come…”