Blackmail Earth (17 page)

But disguising his true intentions would get him only as far as the gate to the gangplank. To board would require his fellow jihadists to shoot their way past the Maldivian security forces who would search each sailor. In the past, the security detail often lazed in the sun and performed cursory baggage checks, but Parvez had warned that they would be more alert tomorrow, and that the jihadists must
take
the ship. Adnan’s assignment would be to get on board, not to engage in battle. Even so, a Mauser pistol lay under the netting for him. Once on deck, he could hold everyone at bay with the threat of the bomb. He had to buy time, Parvez said, and make them sail the tanker into the ocean. Time to get the attention of Satan’s media, east and west and north and south. The unclean everywhere.

The fisherman let his boat drift farther astern of the tanker, and then headed for a beach only three miles from the outskirts of Malé. From there, the greatest journey would begin: to paradise, with the whole world watching.

*   *   *

Rick Birk walked out of the minister’s office with as much dignity as he could muster.
Ten minutes.
And to think he’d also been admonished to not even suggest that the Maldives had its own native-born killers. The minister himself had taken a sudden detour to a lavatory, though Birk suspected the man wanted to free himself from the incisive questions of a brilliant veteran correspondent.

Of course, the denial about homegrown jihad was hardly surprising. In his entire career, which now spanned a half century, Birk had run across no more than a handful of leaders in the developing world who had readily accepted that their country’s problems lay within their own borders—from a sorry lack of resources and the pervasive futility that poverty inevitably spawned. The rest of the riffraff spewed blame on “outsiders” until, of course, the rude reality exploded with bombs and bloodshed. Then they “got” it—but only in the moments before they fled to Switzerland with their national treasury.

These little brown buggers, however, had a case for finger-pointing: The looming disasters throughout much of Oceania could be laid at the feet of the smokestacked, tailpiped West.

As Birk took the last three steps to the main floor, he spotted Senator Gayle Higgens and her entourage bustling through the main entrance.
Argh,
the sight of her spurred a memory painful as a lesion, a real standout in his fat catalog of sexual misadventures.

She’d been a freshman Texas legislator when they’d met, as foulmouthed and shameless in private as she was sanctimonious and born-again in public. He’d been young, too, sent to the Oil Patch to cover some long-forgotten hurricane, whose force, even then, couldn’t have stood up to Gayle Higgens. She’d rounded Birk up like one of her stray steers and herded him right into her bed. She’d tied him down as if she were a real buckaroo, then laughed bitterly when he couldn’t perform.

He’d sworn never to go near Higgens again, and there she was. Christ almighty, aging was pitiless:
Look at her pastry-crust skin; bloated, mashed-potato body; and swollen ankles, shapeless as bread dough.

She pointed the sharp tip of her pink umbrella at him and bellowed, “Get your rascal self over here, Birk.”

He looked around, finding no reprieve.

“What are you doing here?” the senator demanded.

“Scoping out the restless natives,” he responded as suavely as he could, wondering why in God’s name he was even bothering. But he couldn’t help himself: She’d humiliated him almost fifty fucking years ago, yet the moment he saw her he was filled with an unruly desire to reclaim his dignity.

“But you
must
come for the launch of our pilot project. Surely you know about it, you old crow.”

Old crow? That’s some cheap goddamn booze.

Yeah, surely he did know about her pet project, but the seeding of the ocean with iron oxide held no more interest for him than all the bizarrely shaped sea critters whose names escaped him and whose culinary appeal lay chiefly in their most crushed, pounded, and fully processed, deep-fried forms.

“I’m on the hard news beat, Senator.”

She looked at him, openly askance. “
Hard
news?” she laughed. “You?” With those few words, and with that sharp inflection, she brought back the single biggest humiliation of his sex life. “We’re here to change the world. If you’re smart, Ricky, you’ll come along.”

“I’ll be busy.”

“Sorry to hear that you’ll be
tied up.
I’m at the Four Seasons. Come by for a backgrounder, if you’d like a good one.”

Why was everything a double entendre with her? And was that a wink? Had that old sack of nickels actually
winked
at him?

She turned away in the next instant. “Ten o’clock. Down at the port,” she said in parting.

He harrumphed. At ten he’d be at the port, all right, but it would be to catch a water taxi to the island of Dhiggaru. He’d found out the name of weather girl’s old flame—Rafan Yoosuf—and now knew exactly where he could be found. Wasn’t hard. Malé was a small city, and memories were long for beautiful blond girls who scandalized the locals by stealing the heart of one of their sons.

And if Rick Birk understood anything, it was how to trade on resentment to get information. Safe to say that if this Rafan Yoosuf was taking dirt from one island and larding it on another, there would be resentment afloat, never more so than when land meant life.

CHAPTER 12

Blame it on the Barbie Master and Halloween. Jenna could not escape the wardrobe chief’s red footwear. First, it was the booty-boosting, toe-crunching high heels that she’d intentionally ruined in the torrential rainstorm. Now it was slippers. It was as if the Master had fetishized the color … or her feet. She glanced down. Well, at least these things didn’t have those confounded heels. No, these were just ruby-red slippers, but with sequins—replicas of the ones that Dorothy wore so memorably in
The Wizard of Oz.
The slippers formed the foundation, so to speak, of Jenna’s costume for the annual “trick or treat” shenanigans on the set of
The Morning Show,
when all but one of the regulars dressed up for viewers. It seemed like a good, even wholesome idea the first year they tried it, but Jenna had noticed that the women’s costumes had been getting steadily trashier, shrinking in the hot wash of network competition.

“I’ve got the sexiest outfit for you,” Barbie Master said, looking up from carefully tweezing his dark and narrow eyebrows in a vanity mirror.

Jenna wasn’t sure “sexiest” was an adjective that ought to describe any clothes—costumes included—that she wore on morning TV. But as her executive producer and twit extraordinaire Marv Balen put it, “Barbie Master knows best.”

The head of wardrobe offered her a blue Dorothy dress so mini that it
might
have provided modest cover for the teenaged—and diminutive—Judy Garland herself. Shamelessly short. “There’s no business like show business,” Barbie Master sang. Jenna sighed. It could have been worse: He might have dolled her up in a little French maid uniform with black hose, black garters, and more booty-boosting heels.
Wait till next year,
she thought.

Still, Jenna’s costume wasn’t even the raciest surprise of the morning. That honor fell to Andrea Hanson, who, despite her pregnancy, was posed as a hyper-sexed Daisy Mae from the
Li’l Abner
comic strip.
Her idea, or Barbie Master’s?
You never knew with Andrea.

Jenna took a bracing breath and swished onto the set, her stratospheric hemline ogled by virtually every eye in the studio.
Do not bend over a frickin’ inch,
she told herself.

Moments later, Andrea greeted viewers, joking about her own “PG-rated” appearance, though considering that the host was in her sixth month, Jenna doubted that many viewers were laughing along. More likely they felt like squirming at the mother-to-be’s swollen appearance in Daisy Mae’s button-popping, polka-dot blouse.

“Hanson, you are such a hottie,” gushed the usually staid Phillip Gates, the show’s news anchor—wearing his customary suit. Gates’s manner suggested a penis with an untoward regard for expectant mothers. After his breathy appraisal, Gates composed himself and began to deliver the news:

“Halloween took on real horror for Roger Lilton’s presidential hopes this morning when a team of FBI agents knocked on the door of his Washington campaign headquarters with a search warrant.” Video of dark-suited men appeared. “No trick or treat here as agents arrived only hours after the brutalized body of Pagan leader and self-described witch, GreenSpirit, was found in a remote cabin in upstate New York.” A shot of the cabin, taken with a long lens, filled the screen, followed by three-day-old footage of the candidate. “Lilton was once linked romantically to GreenSpirit, and that relationship has become the election season’s biggest controversy.”

Lilton’s press secretary, Jean Mayer, popped up next, calling the FBI raid “a political smear engineered by President Reynolds.” Over file footage of FBI chief Martin Aimes testifying before Congress, Gates read Aimes’s statement, released that morning, characterizing the visit as “routine,” and saying that it did not mean that Lilton was a suspect in the murder.

He didn’t rule it out, though,
Jenna thought.

Two and a half minutes later, Daisy Mae Hanson turned to Jenna in the Weather Center.

“Here’s our own Jenna Withers, eagerly awaiting her unveiling—I think that’s the right word—as Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz.
Jenna, that has to be the shortest Dorothy dress on record. Better hope nobody sneezes in your neighborhood.”

Better hope Li’l Abner doesn’t demand a blood test,
Jenna almost shot back, but she kept her demeanor bright and cheerful, in accord with the unwritten rule of the show that you took Andrea’s handoffs with a big smile
no matter what.

“No twisters or windstorms today, Daisy Mae.” Jenna turned to the camera to report the return of sunny skies and the continuation of high temperatures, chatting about how little of the heavy rainfall had been “captured” because the drought-stricken land was so hard and dry, and the storm had been so fierce and fast. “Plus, those high temps evaporated a lot of the moisture before it could trickle into groundwater supplies.”

In her earpiece, Nicci said, “Don’t get too sciencey,” as if the producer knew that “evapotranspiration” was on the tip of Jenna’s tongue. But, alas, another unwritten rule of the show was that Jenna should never appear to be a brainiac, and she had to think that this was especially true when she was tramped up like a ten-thousand-dollar-a-night call girl.

At ten of nine, after Jenna finished her last weather report of the day, she held down her hem and bolted to wardrobe, scooting behind the Barbie Master’s door. She kicked off the red slippers and pulled off the microdress and white blouse. Quickly, she slipped into a pair of black slacks, a collarless white blouse, and a burgundy jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves. She would have liked to have kept Dorothy’s slippers, but the Barbie Master swooped right down on them.

Nicci popped in to remind Jenna that she had a conference call with the presidential task force in one minute. “And there’s talk that the White House is about to drop a bombshell on you guys.”

Jenna rushed to her office, plugged in an earphone, and patched in to a special White House line. In the seconds of silence that followed, she glanced at a headline in the
Post,
CARNAGE IN THE CATSKILLS
, and eyed a front-page picture of the remote cabin.

During their nightly phone call the previous evening, Dafoe had told Jenna that the rain that had flooded parts of the city—harmlessly, in most cases—had apparently proved ruinous to the Sheriff Walker’s investigation of GreenSpirit’s murder. Walker had announced that he’d called in the New York State Police homicide unit and soon after, the FBI said that it would join the investigation.

In these lazy, waiting moments Dafoe came back to mind, and she found herself thinking how nice it would be to take in an art show with him. Or stroll past the ponds in Central Park. Her reverie snapped when a crisp “Good morning” filled her ear. It was Vice President Andrew Percy’s sharp voice. She sat up in her chair as if reprimanded in class.

*   *   *

Forensia, still hobbled by the coyote bite above her knee, limped up a trail with Sang-mi. Both witches carried flowers and candles, planning to build a shrine as close to the murder scene as possible, and to offer prayers to their religious leader.

A half mile from the cabin, yellow police tape cut off their access. Flowers, unlit candles, Egyptian crosses, pentagrams, and a large framed photograph of the murdered woman already rested against the trunk of a dying tree just off the trail. In the photo, the witch’s hands were raised, as if imploring the faithful. Forensia looked away, finding it all too easy to imagine the same gesture as a desperate, dying plea in the blood-spattered cabin.

She and Sang-mi added their offerings, leaving their candles unlit, as well; despite the recent rains, not a drop of moisture clung to the desiccated forest.

According to Sheriff Walker, what little evidence they’d found indicated that “a methodical killer murdered that woman. The person who did this had no conscience. None.”

Jason,
Forensia thought. She didn’t buy any of the speculation about Lilton being involved. That’s what a lot of cable channels were claiming as they reran clips of Lilton on
The Morning Show,
calling his old girlfriend a “wacko” and saying “I’m addressing that issue head-on.”

No, some jerk like Jason had killed her.
No, not
like
Jason,
she corrected herself,
it
was
Jason
. She wondered if he would have the nerve to show his face at the memorial service. It was planned for sundown in the same clearing where he and his teammates had caused so much trouble at the initiation. The prospect of seeing him frightened her: After she’d told the CBS newsman that Jason was always taking money to lead guys to the naked gatherings, the quarterback had sneered at her and said, “You’re not gettin’ away with this, you fucking bitch.”