At Risk of Winning (The Max Masterson Series Book 1) (24 page)

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ChAPTER SEVENTY

When it arrived at the desk of Jason Bland, the only indicator of the importance of the e-mail was a red flag, and when he saw it, Bland immediately accessed the secrets contained within. Upon Bland’s return from the White house, he had ordered that all available databases be accessed in a desperate search for some information about Masterson that would placate the president.

he was still fuming about the dressing down he had received from Blythe, but his sense of duty and impending unemployment motivated him to gather all of the information the agency had compiled, however trivial, to present the next morning. his briefcase was still filled with the documents and photographs that established the nuclear proliferation crisis in the Middle East, and he replaced the red “high Security” folders with a plain brown folder that looked pitiful in comparison to the crisis that had him worried that a terrorist attack was imminent.

he hadn’t been able to get the president to focus on Pakistan, or anything else, for the past crucial week, and he obsessed about how he could spur the administration to action privately, quickly, and decisively. Maybe, he thought, I’ll be able to bring it up at tomorrow’s meeting. If only I knew a way to get him off this Masterson issue. he scoured the folder for fresh dirt. Finding none, he scanned his e-mail until he found the message from his assistant, Brenda. Good timing, he thought. I might have to buy her a drink if this pans out. She may like girls more than she does me, but I can’t stop thinking about how it would be if she didn’t.

Clicking the attachment, a full-color photograph of Max Masterson scrolled up the screen. Full frontal nudity, even if the good parts were obscured by the rail. They didn’t leave much for the imagination. “he doesn’t look much like presidential material with his clothes on the bedroom floor,” he sneered, then shifted his attention to the woman in the background of the image, wondering if he could get the boys in the lab to digitally enhance her face and body for a better look. It could turn bad very quickly if it became common knowledge that the secretary had already leaked the pictures to the press, but he made the decision to leak the images before he showed them to Blythe. Besides, he reasoned, I can get the press to do it better, and I can read about it in tomorrow’s news. Bland saw the photograph of Max in flagrante delicto as his opportunity to contribute to the president’s reelection campaign and had blind-copied the image to three friendly news agencies in one keystroke.

The 8:00 a.m. meeting at the White house started promptly, and Blythe had ordered that the cabinet members be delayed until the completion of his briefing by his intelligence secretary. This caused considerable huffing and muttering from the secretary of defense and secretary of state, who earnestly believed that they should be privy to all matters of national security, but after all, he was the president and could do as he pleased. They reviewed their confidential folders in the anteroom as aides hovered over them with coffee pots and plates of fresh bagels while the president dealt with other more pressing concerns than the affairs of state.

“Mr. President, we have been conducting intensive surveillance on your opponent since your directive two weeks ago. Our background searches and interviews have only revealed the usual data, and I’m disappointed to report that we have been unable to obtain his medical records for anything other than a broken leg when he was in law school. he was apparently treated by a personal physician all of his life, and the doctor’s records were destroyed after his death three years ago. his legal dossier is squeaky clean. he hasn’t even had a speeding ticket! If there was dirt on Mr. Masterson, we would have found it. But the senator, you know, was a man who enjoyed his privacy, and he protected his son in every way he could. I do have something for you, though.” he pulled an unmarked manila folder from his satchel and handed it to the president with a look of undisguised glee. “As you know, we have been working with members of the press who are in our employ to, how should I say it, perform certain intelligence activities for us in exchange for news which we selectively leak to them. On a slow day, we create the news.”

he paused for effect but Blythe sat passively. Receiving no response, he continued. “We have been monitoring Masterson’s movements by satellite and leaking that information over a continuous live feed. he can’t scratch his ass without us knowing about it. The news networks are getting a lot of viewers by running a 24/7 “Max Tracker” program. As you know, he doesn’t seem to want to play by the rules and show up where the other candidates tend to congregate.”

Blythe held the envelope in his hands and waited for the prologue to hit a crescendo before he examined the contents. When Bland had paused long enough for him to conclude that he had finished, he slid the color photograph from its envelope to see Max Masterson standing naked behind a deck rail. The rail concealed his private parts, but it was obvious that he had just emerged from the bedroom. Behind him, through the veranda doors, an equally nude woman reclined on the bed. The room was dark, her facial features were indistinct, but her shapely profile looked very enticing.

“I took the liberty of leaking it to the press about an hour ago,” Bland volunteered.
Blythe stood and roared. “What authority do you have to anything? I make those decisions! You answer to me and me alone! Do you understand what you have done? This looks like a cologne ad! You have injected sex appeal into this race! Trust me, Bland. Nobody will be talking about my economic reform plan tomorrow or next week or ever!” he raised his voice enough for the entire west wing to hear, and his tone could not be misconstrued. The president was pissed.
Though they never spoke the words, everyone within earshot privately felt relief that it was the intelligence secretary, rather than any of them, who was within striking distance of Blythe in the Oval Office. his penchant for throwing objects during his temper tantrums was the direct cause of several nearly impossible reconstruction efforts underway to restore artifacts that had previously survived over one hundred and fifty years of White house activity. he had a special love of destroying priceless crystal, but assiduously avoided the mementoes of his numerous personal encounters with famous, powerful, and rich figures that adorned the White house walls.
“Mr. President. You wanted me to come up with a way of discrediting Masterson, and I thought—”
“Dammit! I don’t want you to do my thinking for me, either! I have an entire cabinet waiting in the next room who do that for me!” he was whirling out of control now. his arm knocked a ceramic figurine of Martha Washington onto the floor, sparing George for the moment. “I don’t want you to breathe a word to anyone about this! If the voters find out where this beefcake picture came from, I will personally peel your hide off your body with a toothpick! Better yet, I’ll let them do it. Now get out!”
“But Mr. President, you haven’t heard the rest. Masterson is being followed by our people, the press is doing what they can to follow him, but there is someone else out there, too.”
Blythe paused in his tirade, absorbing what he had heard. “What do you mean?” Red-faced and sweating profusely, he plopped into his overstuffed leather chair.
“We don’t know the details yet, but a hit squad has been shadowing him for the past three days. We suspect that it’s a radical terrorist group who call themselves the Infidel Extermination Squad. They’re more of a shadowy group of mercenaries who go after anyone someone is willing to pay good money to eliminate. he suspects he’s being followed, but he has no idea that they want to kill him or why.” “Do you know why?”
“My sources say that their employers think he can beat you.”

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ChAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Rachel and Max flew back from Apalachicola according to the flight plan filed before they left the hangar on the Potomac. his intended meeting with senior staff at Anchor house was hastily cancelled after the nude encounter with the photographer, and Staffman had ordered him back to his campaign headquarters to help with damage control.

Flight plans were not required for small planes that were not occupying airspace near Washington D.C. and were not utilizing areas near airports, but Rachel was a meticulously careful pilot. The plan called for their return to travel the length of the Apalachicola River until it joined the Flint River, and on up the Chattahoochee, which they would follow to Atlanta. They would spend the night in Atlanta before heading home. GPS positioning was available to navigate at night, but the old Beech was not designed for night flying.

Rachel trusted the plane during the day, and Max trusted Rachel to fly them home by the best route that she could devise. With the flat water of the river below them, Max felt certain that if they encountered rough flying weather, Rachel could set down in one of the many bodies of water that stretched below them.

Still, Max was running the encounter with the photographer through his head. he couldn’t understand how his whereabouts were made public in real time. he continued to reject the idea that he was being watched continuously, but the danger of the situation had begun to creep into his awareness. “Rache, I think we are about to be exposing a whole lot more skin in the tabloids than we ever have,” he announced as they passed over into rural Florida. Ahead of them lay vast acres of pine forest, which stretched on either side of the strip of water like a green buffer.

Rachel was intent in thoughts of her own, realizing that her long run of anonymity was about to end. She laughed nervously, but no amount of laughter could assuage the sick feeling in her gut. “Me? What about you, standing naked on the deck? I’ll just be another woman in your entourage, but you will become the poster boy for college girls everywhere . . . if you aren’t already. ”

Concealed beneath the dense forest, Darkhorse watched the approaching plane through a digital scope. The scope was attached to an 80-millimeter cannon specifically designed to shoot dum-dum bullets. The cannon had no legitimate peacetime purpose. It was designed by the Gates Arms factory to knock airplanes out of the sky without an explosive charge. The large-caliber bullets could rip an airplane in half, and the wreckage would yield no evidence of the cause of the crash. The irregular hole produced by the dum-dum bullets would be indistinguishable from the torn wreckage of the downed plane. At a range of five miles, the bullet would pass though the plane without exploding and would be fall inert, buried in heavy forest far from the crash site. By the time his target had crashed, the assassin would be riding away from the scene of the crime in his pickup truck with the cannon concealed in the cargo area. One shot was all it would take to eliminate Max Masterson from the race, and the cause of the crash would never be determined.

I have been waiting for this day for a long time , he thought. It was nice of his girlfriend to come along and to put him out here in the middle of nowhere where I can do my work without taking out a lot of eyewitnesses. I would have done it a lot sooner if he didn’t have people around him all the time. Taking aim on the seaplane’s fuselage, Darkhorse squeezed the trigger.

The report of the cannon was loud, but anyone within the sparsely populated national forest who heard the sound would reasonably conclude that it was a sonic boom from one of the military jets that frequently used the area for war games. he waited until the gaping hole in the seaplane’s fuselage appeared in his scope’s sights, and calmly watched as it lurched and passed below the treetops. When the plane was out of sight, he drove away in the opposite direction, the off-road tires producing a pink-tinged cloud of dust. The red clay road was devoid of traffic, and he smiled. This time, he was confident that his employer would reward him for a job well done.

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ChAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Max turned at the ripping sound as the dum-dum bullet passed through the aluminum sheath of the fuselage. Miraculously, the damage was limited to a jagged gaping hole three feet behind the passenger seat, narrowly missing the cables that controlled the aileron and rudder. If they had been severed, Rachel’s ability to keep the plane in the air would have been compromised to the point where no pilot could have leveled or steered, and a crash would have been inevitable. At the time of impact, their altitude was only fifty feet above the treetops, avoiding the sudden decompression that would spell near-certain death in more modern planes. Modern aircraft flew at altitudes this old plane would never attain.

After a disorienting minute of struggling to regain control, Rachel brought the seaplane to a wobbly landing on the river. From land, it looked like a wounded duck as it struggled to stay aloft, but her skill as a pilot prevented disaster. They splashed down and glided to a stop next to a fishing shack on a small island.

“What just happened?” Max shouted. The hole in the fuselage had ripped larger, allowing him to look out the back of the aircraft, its aluminum ribs the only structure holding the tail onto the body. If he wanted, he could have dived through the hole into the clear waters.

Rachel recovered quickly from the rush of adrenaline and began inspecting the damage as the current brought the plane against the shore. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like a boulder just ripped my plane in half.” She poked her head through the hole, and looked directly into the barrel of an antique shotgun. The holder of the weapon was an elderly black man, and behind him, a woman and a teenage girl, who held onto each other, obviously fascinated by the sight of the damaged plane floating at the end of the dock.

The man spoke first. “I’m Elias Petrie. I don’t know much, but I do know that you ain’t from these parts. If you’s here ta hurt me, I will hurt you back. If you’n here ta hurt me family, Ah’ll hurt ya plenty, an then we’ll see who all’s standin’.”

Max swung the door of the seaplane open with great care, and the man turned the shotgun in his direction. Max spoke in measured tones. “We’re not here to hurt anyone, sir. As you can see, we had a little trouble with the plane. I’m sorry if our landing hurt your fishin’.”