First daughter, p.22
First Daughter, page 22
He began to lead her down the steps.
She tugged against him gently, almost playfully. "Don't you want to go to Cafe Luna?"
"This is a special night." He continued to steer her down. "I've got a special place in mind."
They entered that area of the Spanish Steps where, because of the burned-out bulb, shadows billowed out across the stone and concrete like ink from an overturned bottle.
"Where are you taking me?" Calla asked. "Have we been there before?"
"It's a surprise," was all he said to her. "I promise you'll like it."
Huge trees rose far above their heads, the skeletal branches scratching the sky, as if trying to dig the diamond-hard stars out of a setting made milky by the District's million lights. In among this winter bower Calla shivered again, and Kray held her tighter, one arm around her waist.
All of a sudden, he lurched against her, as if his left ankle had turned over on a stone. She stumbled against the trunk of one of the trees and, as she did so, Kray stabbed her once in the back. So precise was the thrust, so practiced the hand, so unwavering the intent, the wickedly sharpened paletta did the rest.
Kray held her lifeless body and glanced around. Had anyone been looking, they'd have seen a man holding his drunk or ill wife, but as luck would have it, no one was about. Kray slowly laid Calla's body at the bole of the tree. With quick, practiced movements, he snapped on surgeon's gloves, pulled out the cell phone he'd taken from one of Alli's Secret Service guards, put it into her hand, pressed her fingers around it, then threw it into a nearby evergreen bush. Then he picked up the paletta. It was such a superb implement; it had penetrated through cloth, skin, and viscera with such ease, there was hardly any blood on it. He pocketed the weapon and, his mission accomplished, vanished into the shadowy forest of swaying trees.
THIRTY - ONE
IT'S A universal law of teenhood that the bully always returns for more. Maybe he's drawn to what he perceives as weakness, because other people's weakness makes him stronger. Maybe he's a sadist and can't help himself. Or maybe he just can't leave well enough alone. In any event, Andre returns to Jack's life, stronger, meaner, more determined than ever.
It's as if he's been biding his time, accumulating power, calculating his return like a general who's been forced to make a strategic retreat from the field of battle. The source of his newfound power isn't only his patron, Cyril Tolkan, but a supplier he's found on his own—a man named Ian Brady.
"One thing fo' sho," Gus says with a fair amount of scorn, "Ian Brady ain't no black man. Shit, Ian Brady ain't no American name, no way, no how. But, shee-it, he a ghost, that man, 'cause none a my snitches know shit 'bout him. I mean, who the fuck is he? Where he come from? Who's his contacts? He got so much fuckin' juice, he could light up alla D.C."
This tirade occurs one evening when Jack and Gus are at home, listening to James Brown. Jack has made a couple of purchases at the local record store and is eager to both hear them and share them with Gus. In the wake of Gus's rant, he wonders whether he should keep the LPs under wraps, but having brought up the subject during dinner, he has no choice.
"Huh! I mighta known!" Gus says, holding the cardboard sleeves in his massive hand. "Elvis Presley an' the Rolling Stones. White boys, jus' like you. And some of 'em look like they ain't eaten in weeks!"
"Just listen, will you? You're such a hard-ass!"
"Well, I heard Elvis, an' he ain't half-bad. So play this here other, so's I can see whut yo' taste in music's like."
Jack carefully slides the James Brown disc back in its sleeve, then rolls out the black vinyl disc of Out of Our Heads, puts the needle down, and out blasts "Mercy, Mercy." After the last jangling bars of "One More Try" fade into the walls, Gus turns to Jack, says, "Play dat again, son."
Jack puts the needle back on the first cut, and Mick Jagger starts it up.
Gus shakes his head in wonder. "Shee-it, fo' skinny little white boys, they sho-nuff do shout."
JACK NOW goes regularly to the library on G Street NW. At first, he went because Reverend Taske urged him to, but lately he's realized that he likes going. Because of Taske's training, he's tamed his fright of reading new texts; it's become more of a challenge, a way out of the strange little world his dyslexia shoved him into.
He loves the dusty air, golden with motes of history. He loves opening books at random, finding himself engrossed, so that he goes back, starts at page one and doesn't stop until he's devoured the last word. Unlike movies and TV that show him everything, even if he doesn't like it, books transport him into the world of his own imagination. As long as he can create pictures from the words he reads—scenes filled with characters, conflict, good and evil—he can build a world that's in many ways closer to the one other people inhabit. And this makes him feel less like an outsider. He feels he is that much closer to rubbing shoulders with the passersby on the street. This is the atmosphere that draws him day after day into the dusty quietude, calm as a still lake. But in those depths something waits for him, as it does almost every teenager: the fear that recurs, the fear that needs to be faced.
Jack comes face-to-face with his one Monday afternoon. He's back in the stacks, pulling down massive treatises on his latest passion: criminal psychology. A head in the book precludes vigilance. But who would think to be vigilant in a District public library? That's how Andre thinks, anyway. He's been following Jack to G Street every day for a week, until he's familiar with the schedule. It says something about just how deep his feelings of vengeance run that he's been on surveillance for five straight days when he could be negotiating his next shipment of smack from Ian Brady.
But some things are more important than H, more important than greenbacks, because they cry out to be resolved. And, frankly, Andre can't rest easy until this particular matter is resolved to his satisfaction.
Jack doesn't hear him as Andre creeps up from behind. Andre, in crepe-soled shoes he's bought for the occasion, approaches slowly, relishing the end to the ache that's been inside him ever since Cyril Tolkan delivered his punishment.
At the very end, he makes his rush, silent, filled with the power of righteous rage. He grabs Jack by his collar, lifts him bodily into the air, slams him against the rear wall. Shelves tremble; books spill onto the floor. Andre, his eyes alight with bloodlust, jams a forearm across Jack's windpipe both to silence him and to subdue him as quickly as possible. Though he's filled with a desire for vengeance, Andre is nothing if not pragmatic. He doesn't want to get caught in here with a dead or dying body. He has no intention of going into whitey's slammer, either now or ever.
With a tiny snik! he flicks open his switchblade. His victim seems so stunned, his hands aren't even up, trying to pry his forearm away. Maybe he doesn't have enough oxygen to act. Either way, it doesn't matter to Andre, who jabs the point of the blade in toward Jack's diaphragm. He's aiming for the soft spot just below the sternum, to drive the long, slender blade upward into Jack's heart.
JACK'S HANDS, down by his sides, have not, however, been idle. His left hand has kept its grip on the thick hardcover book he's been reading, and now, as he hears the telltale snik! of the switchblade, he reflexively presses the tome to his chest. The point of the knife encounters cotton, pasteboard, and paper instead of flesh. Andre's eyes widen in surprise, then squeeze shut as Jack's knee plows hard into his testicles.
As Andre begins to double over, Jack's windpipe is freed. He sucks in a great lungful of air, brings the book up, jams its edge into Andre's neck. To maintain the maximum force, he's obliged to keep both his hands on the spine of the book and so lacks the means to force Andre to drop the switchblade. This weapon now swings back and forth like a pendulum with a razor's edge, grazing first Jack's ear, then his shoulder. With each wild pass, Jack feels searing pain, and hot blood begins running down him. The next arc could find his carotid artery.
Gritting his teeth, he jams the book harder into Andre's throat, hears a crackle like a sheet of paper being crumpled prior to being thrown away. Then Andre's mouth opens wide, emits a sound like a grandfather clock about to break down.
Jack, staring into Andre's bloodshot eyes, begins to cry. Part of him knows what's happening, what the outcome will be, but that part must stand aside while the organism is in danger. Andre, in a last, desperate attempt to kill, brings the edge of the switchblade up to the level of Jack's ear. He points it inward, aiming for the canal opening. Jack, terrified, shifts his weight. The corner of the book penetrates into the hole made by the fracture of Andre's cricoid cartilage. All air is cut off.
Andre's knife hand moves. The point of the switchblade is almost at the canal opening. Jack leans in with all his weight; more of the book pushes inside Andre. Andre's knife hand begins to tremble; the momentum falters. Tears are streaming down Jack's cheeks. They fall onto Andre, into his wound. Andre's eyes stare at him. They are unreadable.
There is now a contest of wills. Andre can no longer breathe, but he holds the knife. All he has to do is summon the strength to jam it point-first into Jack's ear. There is a moment of stasis, when the power, the wills of both boys are held in balance. Nothing moves. The small sounds of the library, the occasional whisper, the soft pad of footfalls, the tiny, very particular sound of a book being slipped out from between its neighbors, all seem exaggerated, like the sounds of insects deep in the forest. All the trappings of civilization have become irrelevant, useless. All that remains are the tiny symphony of sounds and the beating of your own heart.
Nature abhors stasis; like fame, it's fleeting, though its seconds may seem like minutes. Jack feels the point of the knife enter his ear canal, and he twists the corner of the book. Andre's eyes roll up; his lips are drawn back in a rictus. He has nothing left, only a helpless rage that ushers him rudely from life to death.
Jack, panting like a sick dog, lies against Andre's crumpled form. He feels as if a light has gone out in the depths of his soul, as if he has lost a part of himself. He is in shock, stunned at what has occurred. There are no words, no thoughts in his head adequate to what he's feeling. Soon enough, he begins to shake with a profound chill. The strong copper taste of blood is on his tongue, but whether it's his blood or Andre's or both is impossible to say.
In a dim dead-end of the library where no one comes, he lies in a daze, in a kind of trancelike state, remembering an Indian parable from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna he came across weeks ago. It happened that a tigress, large with an unborn cub, attacked a herd of goats. As it sprang forward to grip in its teeth a terrified goat, the goatherd shot it. The tigress fell, and in that moment before she expired, she gave birth to her cub. The cub grew up with the goats, eating grass and, mimicking its adopted brothers and sisters, bleating. Until the day a male tiger found the herd. It quite naturally attacked the youngster, who did not fight back, but only bleated. The male tiger gripped the adolescent by the scruff of his neck, dragged him to the river.
"Look at our reflections," the male tiger said. "You and I are as brothers. Why do you bleat like a goat? Why do you live with them instead of feasting on them?"
"I like grass," the adolescent replied.
"Because grass is all you know."
Whereupon the male tiger leapt upon a goat, tore out its throat. The adolescent was close enough to the feast to taste the goat's blood. Then he put his head down and bit into the flesh, which he discovered he liked much more than the taste of grass.
The male tiger lifted his head, watching the adolescent gorge himself on goat meat. With his great muzzle covered in blood, he said, "Now you and I are the same. Now you know your true Self. Follow me into the forest."
Jack, weeping still, gets to his feet. He dries his eyes and, finding his shirtfront bloodied, grabs his jacket off the back of a chair, puts it on. He finds that if he buttons the jacket up to his neck, the blood is hidden.
On the verge of leaving, he turns to regard Andre. What has happened has affirmed a notion embedded in his subconscious for a number of years: It isn't simply his dyslexia that's made him an Outsider. He won't bleat and run like a goat. He won't ever rub shoulders with the passersby on the street; he doesn't want to. Like the tiger, he stands apart. The jungle is his home, not the cultivated field.
THIRTY - TWO
ONCE EVERY two weeks or so, Secretary Dennis Paull scheduled a senior staff meeting at dawn, much to the grumbling of those closest to him. There was no obvious reason for doing this except to keep them on their toes, which is what pissed off his senior staff because it cut into their social lives. God forbid they should attend one of Paull's senior staff meetings with a yawn or, worse, hungover. The secretary would hang them out to dry in front of their colleagues.
The meetings were held at Fort McNair, which was a building that didn't look like a fort and was in the heart of downtown Washington. No one understood why the meetings were held at an army base and not at Homeland Security HQ, but no one had the intestinal fortitude to query Secretary Paull. Consequently, people thought he was simply eccentric and this behavior, along with numerous other peccadilloes, simply became part of the Beltway lore concerning him.
This was precisely what Dennis Paull had in mind. He never did or said anything without a specific reason, though that reason, like the moves of a chess player, was not always readily apparent. The reason Paull scheduled the meetings at the crack of dawn was because virtually no one was around. The reason he held them at Fort McNair was that it was a place within which even the president couldn't track him.
This particular morning, at precisely 0617, Secretary Paull called a ten-minute break, pushed his chair back, and strode from the conference room. He walked down a number of halls, went down a flight of stairs, up another just to reassure himself that he was absolutely alone. Then he ducked into the men's room at the rear of the third floor. No one stood by the row of sinks; no one was using the urinals. He went down the row of stalls, opening each door to ensure no one was in temporary residence.
Then he banged open the door to the last stall in the row and said, "Good morning, sir."
Edward Carson, the president-elect, who had been reading the Washington Post, stood up, folded the paper under one arm, and said, "No need to call me sir yet, Dennis."
"Never too early to get started, sir."
The two men emerged from the stall. "Imagine what the Drudge Report would say about this," Carson grunted. "We're all alone?"
"Like Adam before Eve."
Carson frowned. "What news of Alli? Lyn is beside herself."
Paull knew it wasn't presidential for Carson to add that he was also beside himself. Presidents never lost their cool, no matter how dire the straits. "I believe we're closer to finding her today than we were yesterday."
"Knock off the media-speak," Carson said testily. "This is my daughter we're talking about."
"Yessir." Paull rubbed his chin. "The ball is in your man's court. I've given McClure every ounce of freedom I possibly can without showing my hand to the POTUS."
Carson's frown deepened. "But is that going to be enough, Dennis?"
"I'd be lying if I said I knew for sure, sir. But you and McClure go back quite a ways, from what you tell me, and you've said he's the best man for the job."
"And I stand by that," the president-elect said stiffly.
"If it makes you feel any better," Paull went on, "my agent agrees with you."
"The only thing that's going to make me feel better is the safe return of my daughter."
There was a sudden noise outside, and both men went completely still. Paull held up a finger, crossed to the door, pulled it open quickly. One of the cleaning personnel was turning a corner. When he was out of sight, Paull ducked back into the men's room, shook his head in the negative.
"I had to deliver Yukin into the POTUS's hands," Paull said. "I had the evidence against Mikilin, and I gave it to the POTUS before he left for Moscow. I attended a celebration of sorts following the POTUS's return. He's got the Russian president in his back pocket now, so does he demand exports from RussOil, as I suggested? Does he forge a pact to create a joint strategic uranium reserve, as I also suggested? No, of course not. Instead, he's spent the ammunition I gave him obtaining Yukin's promise to back the POTUS when he makes his final national-policy address to the nation. In it, he's going to charge that the government has direct evidence that Beijing is funding E-Two, and that the First American Secular Revivalists are, in fact, a front for E-Two. And where d'you think that bogus evidence will come from? Moscow, of course. And no one will be able to say it's false." Paull crossed to the door once again, put his ear to it. Satisfied, he returned to where Carson waited for him. "The POTUS is going to declare war on the missionary secularists of any and every stripe."
"I want to help you, Dennis, but until Alli is returned to me safe and sound, my hands are tied. As long as there's a suspicion that either E-Two or the FASR is behind her abduction, I can't make a stand against the president."
"I understand your overriding concern here, sir, but we've had a complication."
Carson's blue eyes bored into the secretary's. "What kind of a complication?"
"The men I sent to keep McClure safe were compromised."
He'd caught the president-elect's full attention.
"Compromised in what way?"
"The POTUS's people gave them orders to terminate."
A deathly silence overtook them. "Jack's safe?"
"Yessir, he is."
"I don't want another incident like that," Carson said. "Am I being clear?"
Paull stiffened. He knew a rebuke when he heard one, and this one was well deserved. "Absolutely, sir." Somewhere along the line, his careful security net had been breached. He had to find out where with all possible haste.
Carson stepped away, regarded his pale, lined face in the mirror, then turned around. "Dennis, if the POTUS got on to your men, then he knows. Jack's not the only one in terrible danger. We are, too."
