Alone again in the quiet, the senator spun his chair one more time to take in his favorite view. Chris’s worries were all legitimate ones, and bombast aside, Clayton worried about continued retaliation from Frankel. Those pictures that Wiggins alluded to on the telephone scared the hell out of him. God only knew what hideous poses they’d attach his face to.
Much was at stake here. Truth be told, Clayton didn’t give much of a shit anymore about his future in the Senate-he’d had a nice run, after all-but he cared a great deal about how the history books would record his tenure here.
The hell of it was, by actually caring about such things, people like Clayton Albricht were easy prey for the political predators of Washington.
Clayton Albricht had staked his career on middle-class morality, and it had cost him dearly. While his colleagues lied without remorse, he prided himself on his ability to hold the high ground of wisdom over the sewer of political correctness. Now, as he stood on the precipice-yet another hero ready to tumble-his innocence and his sense of fair play had become his greatest weakness, while his opposition grew stronger through a campaign of perpetual deceit.
Maybe it really was time to retire. He didn’t much like the way the earth had been spinning recently, anyway. But he couldn’t let Frankel go without a fight. If he did, then where would all of this stop? Maybe that was Albricht’s legacy. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the senator’s lifetime of legislative battles would be obscured by this one fight by the Good Guy to prevail over the Bad Guy. The white hat against the black hat, just like in the old movies of his youth.
Maybe, when the battle was over, Pretty Boy would learn that he’d gambled too aggressively on the public’s willingness to believe sparkling blue eyes over the wizened countenance of a wrinkled old man.
However it might ultimately turn out, this was certainly a time to be careful. MacDonald had been right about the screams of misconduct and abuse of power if Clayton assigned his own staffers to dig up the dirt on Frankel. He needed help from someone else…
The inspiration hit him with a near-physical impact. Why he hadn’t thought of it hours ago, he’d never understand. The time had come for some good old-fashioned Chicago-style politics.
And he knew of no better player at that particular game than his old friend Harry Sinclair. Forgoing the usual formalities, Clayton dialed the number himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A body bag with a window.
Jake had forgotten about the special breed of panic that rushed over him every time he sealed himself inside one of these damn suits. The world seemed very small when the only sound you heard was that of your own breathing. He checked to make sure he could reach his escape knife and found himself smiling. Not only could he cut his way out if he had to, but with the Glock still on his hip, he could shoot his way out as well.
Typical of training equipment, he supposed, this stuff was old yet functional. Prior to donning the ensembles, Carolyn had insisted that they perform perfunctory tightness-testing by flapping out the folds, much the way you’d shake out a rug, then laying them out on the ground. Once the folds had relaxed, and air entered the body, arms, and legs of the suits, they zipped them shut and rolled the legs up tight, forming a balloon of air in the upper part. With no obvious leakage, Carolyn proclaimed them safe to wear.
His air pack on his back, and his face mask in place, Jake wrestled himself into the body of the suit and awaited Travis’s help to zip it up around him. As the hood settled over his head, Jake remembered with a dull ache in his gut that the last time he’d looked through a similar Plexiglas face shield, it had a ragged bullet hole through the center of it.
No one said anything. It had been a lot of years, but Jake remembered from the old days that this was the time of smart-ass machismo, practical jokes, and snide comments. Now the undercurrent of fear was palpable.
If this didn’t work, they were flat out of options.
When all the players were at the same stage of readiness, Travis stepped up to each of them in turn and pulled the heavy zippers shut; first Nick, then Jake, and finally Carolyn, where he paused for a long moment and said something to her that Jake couldn’t hear. The comment drew an extended embrace between the two of them, and for just the briefest of instants, he was jealous. Somehow, as adolescence approached, Mom was becoming more important to his son than Dad; and he knew in his heart that it was likely to remain that way forever. The realization triggered a catch in his throat and blurred his vision, but he shook the emotion away. This was neither the time nor the place.
When Carolyn was at last sealed into her Army-green butyl rubber suit, she initiated a round of thumbs-ups. Radios were not a part of this bare-bones entry operation, but they’d developed a system of simple hand signals to convey essential messages, the most critical of which was the universal distress signal-both hands straight up in the air. Even in the old days, no one messed around with that one. You raise your hands over your head, and you’d better by God be in serious trouble, because people were going to risk their lives to get you to safety super-pronto.
Nick paused long enough to duct-tape the combustible gas indicator to the sleeve of his suit before picking up the sledgehammer and leading the way forward. As unlikely as it was to encounter a combustible atmosphere, fire was the single hazard for which these rubber suits provided exactly zero protection. If the detector vibrated against his arm, they would abort the entry and decide what to do about it later. Each of them slung portable hand lights over their shoulders, and Jake hefted the steel pry bar, while Carolyn took custody of the body bags.
Thumbs-up all around, and it was time to head out. They’d already breathed up five minutes’ worth of precious air, and already their suits had begun to puff out from the pressure of their exhaled breath. Pretty soon they’d all look like the StayPuft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters- one of Travis’s favorite movies.
Jake shivered as the first drops of sweat blazed a trail down his backbone, despite the chill of the afternoon air. Inside of five minutes, he’d be soaked, with puddles of sweat accumulating in the tips of his gloves and the soles of his shoes. As he trudged off after the others, last in line, he paused for a moment to look back at Travis, who suddenly looked impossibly small standing there amid the empty boxes. Jake ventured a wave, but his son turned away.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sherman Quill said aloud as he nosed his police cruiser up to the main gate of the Newark site. Of all the times he’d been out to this godforsaken place, this was the first time he’d ever seen anything out of the ordinary, beyond the occasional teenagers locked in carnal ecstasy. Well, there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there?
Somebody had cut a hole in the damn fence! And he could still see the tire tracks in the grass where they’d driven through the opening and down toward the exclusion zone.
What to do now, he wondered. The hole in the chain-link was nowhere near big enough for his full-size Ford with its light bar and whip antenna, and Sherman didn’t have the tools with him to make it any bigger.
He pulled the white microphone from its clip and brought it to his lips. “Unit One to Control,” he said in his practiced monotone.
“Go ahead, Unit One,” the dispatcher replied.
“Hi, Nan. Listen, I’m out at the Newark site and we’ve got a bit of a problem here. Somebody cut a big old hole right through the fence. I’m gonna check it out, but I want you to see about getting some backup for me from State P.D., okay?”
“Okay, Sherm,” Nan replied. In a town this size, formal radio procedure just seemed silly. “You gonna wait there till I check on availability?”
Sherman thought about that one for a moment. Wasn’t a bad idea, actually, but he’d hate like hell to lose the bad guys if he waited, just as he hated the thought of scrambling the state boys only to find nothing there. “No,” he answered at length. “I’m gonna go take a look-see while you call. I’ll give you a shout on the portable if I need anything.”