“Now, now, darlin’, don’t lose faith in the process.”
“Why shouldn’t I? Nobody gets anything done in this city anymore without a gun to their head.”
“That’s not always true. You can… you can still get things done if you… if you know how,” Donny said smugly, a crooked smile on his face. Clyde May had seen to it he was no longer feeling much pain.
“Yeah? Give me one example,” she said. “Tell me about one time when you got a bill passed without it turning into World War Four between red and blue.”
“Well, okay, okay now… So, fuh example, a few weeks ago, a friend… friend of mine called me up. Needed a favor. Wanted a little something-something passed. So I got it passed for him. Put it into a propro… an appropro…,” he stopped and drunkenly spit out the word, “an ah-pro-pre-aye-shuns bill, and it sailed right on through.”
“Just like that?”
“Jus’ like that.”
“That must be a good friend,” she said, and scooted toward him in a way that lifted her skirt a little higher. “How does one become such a good friend to such an important senator?”
“Well… you have to be gen… gen… gen’rous.”
“Maybe I should call up this friend of yours, and he can give me pointers on how to be generous,” she said, stooping slightly so as to unfetter his view. “What’s this friend’s name?”
Donny couldn’t help himself. Even though he knew she was watching, his eyes shot down her blouse, to that black lacy bra he had already taken off a hundred times in his mind.
“Tha’s parta what makeshimafriend,” he slurred. “I can’t tell you.”
“Oh, come on. I’m your friend, right? So you can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”
She slid close to him. He wet his lips.
“Oh, you’re my friend, all right,” he murmured.
“Why don’t you whisper it to me?” she purred. She leaned her ear so it was right next to his mouth. Her hand rested lightly on his thigh.
He was pretty much addled in every way a man can be addled. And yet, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, in a place that not even Clyde May could reach, there was a small voice that told him perhaps he shouldn’t say.
“Now, now,” he said. And then, in a minor victory for self-control, he stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me for one moment, I do believe I need to use the restroom. You’ll be here when I get back… We’ll… We’ll toast the great state of… of Al-BAMA!”
“That we will,” she said.
The moment he left the room, she sighed. This was taking too long. And while the Clyde May wasn’t getting her drunk, it still burned her esophagus every time she took a sip. She had also been leered at enough for one night. She was ready to be done with this.
She had done her best to pry the information out of him directly. She had failed. It was time for her chemically aided backup plan. She removed the small glassine envelope of powder she had been keeping wedged in her shoe, parted its seal, then poured its contents into the senator’s glass.
Too much pentobarbital would actually kill ol’ Donny. Dosed properly, it would take less than fifteen seconds to put him into a sound slumber for four hours. She swirled the glass’s amber contents until the powder dissolved.
When he returned, they toasted Al-bama, despite the fact that it had lost a syllable sometime during the night. Then Xi Bang counted backward from ten. By the time she reached two, Donny Whitmer’s chin had hit his chest.
Just to have a little insurance in case she needed to resort to blackmail — and because she thought it would amuse Storm — she went over to the slumbering Senator, posed with him suggestively, and snapped a few photos.
She e-mailed them to Storm, then went to work. She had four hours but didn’t feel like testing the limits of the drug’s potency. She quickly laid the senator out on the couch, where he would think he had just drifted off. He would have a Hall of Fame hangover in the morning. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, because she felt sorry that he should make all that effort and not get anything for it.
Then she began rifling through his files. She started with the ones in his office, trying to be systematic and yet also remaining aware the clock was ticking. The moment she determined a file was not relevant — either to the Alabama Future Fund or the appropriations rider — she moved on to the next.
An hour down, she still had nothing. She had been through all the donor files and had moved on to others. She kept checking for false fronts to the filing cabinets or for unmarked files. But everything was straightforward. And dull. And, worst of all, legal. It was feeling increasingly fruitless.
Two hours in, she was starting to panic. She considered calling Storm, but what was he going to tell her? He wasn’t there. He couldn’t see what she could see. He’d be guessing even more than she was.
She sat down in the great man’s chair, trying to clear her mind, staring at the top of his desk as she did so. That’s when she saw a yellow legal pad with “ROLL TIDE PAC” written atop it — and nothing else. Curious, she started leafing through it. The next four pages were either nonsense or irrelevant.
Then, on the sixth page in, she hit gold. The words “ALABAMA FUTURE FUND” were prominent at the top of the page. Underneath was “$5 MILLION” and “SPLIT INTO FIVE LLCs.”
And then, underneath that, was what she and Storm had come halfway across the world to find. It was the name of the man who had funded the PAC, the man who had hired Gregor Volkov, the man whose orders were directly responsible for the deaths of five bankers and their families, the man who planned to inflict financial turmoil on the entire world.
It was underlined three times, and it was as plain as the senator’s block handwriting:
“THANK YOU WHITELY CRACKER.”
CHAPTER 23
NEW YORK, New York
lara Strike had seemed as surprised to see Derrick Storm as he was to see her, if not more so. After all, he was the one who was supposed to be dead.
But before they could deal with any of that, there was a mess to clean up. There was always a mess to clean up when Clara Strike was around.
He needed to pay off the cabbie. The Maserati needed to be towed — Storm didn’t want to know what the repair bill would be; he was just glad that Whitely Cracker didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would sweat it too much. And, last but not least, New York’s Finest needed to be assuaged.
All the while, Storm was annoyed. Annoyed at being lied to about Strike’s involvement in the case. Annoyed that there were obviously some moving pieces Jones had not told him about, as usual. Annoyed that for all his annoyance, he kept stealing glances at Clara and feeling the familiar longings. Her curly brown hair. Her shining brown eyes. The small whiffs he kept getting of her perfume. Damn, did that perfume have a hold on him.
During the four years he had been officially dead, Storm had not seen her once. He hadn’t even missed her. Or felt bad about leading her to think he was dead. As far as he was concerned, turnabout was fair play. Clara Strike had died on him once, too — died in his arms, even. She hadn’t contacted him, hadn’t found some small way to let him know it was all one of Jedediah Jones’s tricks. She had let him go to her funeral, let him grieve, let him lose a piece of his soul thinking he had lost the woman he loved. He was younger. More naïve. More vulnerable. He still hurt easily back then.
To her, a faked death was just business — an occupational hazard. To him, it had been emotional torture. When he found out she had been alive that whole time and could have spared him all that suffering with one phone call, he swore he would never forgive her. And he hadn’t.