Born to Run (13 page)

“Mothers lie all the time,” said Bill in an unusually flat, soft tone, as if he was trying not to remember something painful.

“Or maybe, Isabel, you remembered some things wrong?” suggested Hank.

“Gregory, I’m not doing the show,” said Isabel, standing again to make her point though it was an unseen gesture to those on the other end of the phone.

“But Ed said… and I promised them,” Gregory pleaded, brushing his hand over his bald head as if he had nowhere to hide.

“Tell them you misunderstood,” she said.

Ed smiled, but Gregory didn’t.

OVER in LA, Elia was pulling another piece off a
quattro stagioni
pizza. She and her boyfriend had just seen the
Close-up
promo. Simon muted the sound and finished
chewing. “So?” he said, his eyes drilling into her.

Elia looked embarrassed and picked at a piece of olive. “Really, I don’t know. Mandrake flew back to DC for the shoot and no one’s talking. It’s like there’s a
lockdown.”

“You’ve got to find out, Elia.”

“I can’t.”

Abruptly, Simon stood and stared down at her.

“Okay, I’ll try,” she said.

N
IKI’S BUTTER-CREAM LEGS brushed against the green sheets, revealing her at her best…

Niki Abbott was no egotist. A hedonist, yes. A sybarite and a sensualist, absolutely. Tonight would be perfect. If you were going to do someone like Robert J. Foster, the presidential candidate
himself, it needed to be momentous. Breathtaking. Tonight demanded far more than quickie sex in a vice-presidential hotel shower stall.

Tonight, Foster would receive more than he’d ever dreamed of, and given his track record that was saying something. In two hours, Candidate Foster would be on his own knees, praising the
Lord.

She looked up at the ceiling mirror to ogle herself. Voluptuous. Niki loved how when you said that word out loud, your tongue did what it meant. Voluptuous. Loose lips sink ships, she
smiled.

Niki’s fingers feathered herself, and the high gloss of her nails winked sparks back at the sun that was streaming in between the slats of the venetians.

Bobby Foster would indeed have his breath taken away.

E
LIA AND SIMON tore over to the studio in his plumber’s truck. As though they were on a heist, he kept the motor running and she went in,
heading upstairs for the office Mandrake had occupied but with no idea what she was looking for.

While the door to Mike’s office was closed, she tried the knob and it unlocked. Betty was still working in the open-plan, so Elia mumbled she’d lost her pen somewhere, a Montblanc
she’d been given for her birthday.

Thankfully, the cleaners hadn’t made it to this floor yet. Three paper planes were lying in Mike’s waste paper basket and, without unfolding them, Elia stuffed them into her bag.
There was nothing on his desk or in any of the drawers. No, she was wrong: the third drawer down contained an unopened four-pack of Trojan condoms. Mandrake really was a sleazebag, she decided, but
when she saw the box was still sealed she allowed herself a quick smirk.

Something else? There had to be something.

She punched ‘redial’ on his desk phone and wrote down the long grey number that scrolled across the small screen. She kept punching until she’d retrieved the numbers of his
last five calls; the phones here stopped remembering at five.

She pasted a smile on her face as she left Mike’s ex-office and almost skipped over to Betty. “Yay!” she shouted, holding up her pen and a finger to mock the V-for-victory
sign. “Now I can sleep.” She bounced over to her own desk, logged onto her computer, located the master contact list for the political campaign teams, and emailed it to herself at
home.

ELIA approached Simon’s truck with a bit of a shrug. It was running but he wasn’t inside. She cast around and saw him loitering at the corner and signalled him
back.

“Well?” he asked as he slammed the door shut beside him.

“A few scraps of paper and some phone numbers,” she told him. “Can we get the hell out of here? I’m shaking like a leaf.”

As he drove, she pulled the folded pages out of her bag and flattened them out on her knee. The first was a print-out of an email from Mike’s assistant in Washington, confirming dinner for
him with his wife when he got back. “Sleazebag,” she repeated to herself as she recalled the condoms. The second sheet had
The Un-Making of a President
typed on it with
by
Mike Mandrake
underneath, but no other text. She didn’t need to remind herself about his ego. And the last sheet was the first page of the LA office’s internal phone list which, no
doubt, he tossed away knowing he wouldn’t have to put up with the likes of Elia any more.

“And?” Simon twisted his head around to glance at the pages.

“Nothing here, but wait till we get home so I can check some phone numbers.”

FOUR of the five numbers had East Coast area codes: Washington DC, New York City, Boston and Greenwich. The fifth was a number she already knew because she’d had to ring
it herself a half-dozen times. It was the speed-dial for Mike’s assistant.

10 PM in LA wasn’t the best time to be making calls back east. “Here goes nothing,” and Elia dialled the first number.

“
This is the Mandrakes
,” said the answering machine. Elia hung up. “Next,” she said, punching in the second number. After one “Oops, wrong number” to a
sleepy voice familiar to her as one of
Close-up
’s co-producers, followed by a ring-out, Elia felt this might be it:

“
This is the Harvard Law School office of Professor Robert Dupont. Please leave a message
…”

Elia didn’t, but did an internet search on him instead, striking what she hoped was paydirt. “Simon,” she yelled to him in the bedroom. “This could be something.”
He came over. “Mandrake phoned a professor of constitutional law at Harvard,” she said. “This guy’s credentials go way up to here,” she added, her hand hovering above
her head.

After speculating what this might mean, from absolutely nothing to damn near everything, Simon pressed Elia to contact Isabel’s campaign office.

“At this time of night?”

“For this, absolutely.” He could see Elia’s anxiety growing. At best, she’d already breached her duty of fidelity to her employer; at worst, she was guilty of theft.
“It’s not as if we broke into the Watergate or anything,” he said sincerely, but that only made Elia’s mouth even dryer.

“Then
I’ll
do it,” he said, grabbing the phone.

Elia watched him, relieved. In truth, she wanted it done but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I got to speak to the guy in charge,” Simon said. “My name’s, er, Joshua and it’s confidential.”

“At 1 AM?” It was Julia Lee, a night owl who covered the phones in Isabel’s campaign headquarters three nights a week, from midnight to dawn. She was a veteran Republican
volunteer four campaigns in a row.

“Confidential
and
urgent, okay?” But Simon was getting nowhere. “Did you see the
Close-up
promo?” he asked.

She hadn’t. She’d been staying at her sister’s the last two days, and her TV had been busted.

“It’s about that,” Simon said. “Just find the head guy and tell him. I’ll hold.”

Gregory and about fifteen people had been locked up since well before Julia arrived. The receptionist she’d replaced at midnight had warned her there was some crisis going down about
Close-up
.

Julia grimaced as she went in: drink cans; half-eaten pizza cold and curling on sheets of yellow legal paper all over the central table; the close odour of people who’d been fretting
sixteen hours straight. Disgusting… but she loved it. The acrid smells, the heat, the mess, the pressure. At first, no one noticed her. Several pairs of eyes were locked onto computer
screens. Maybe eight people had their ears glued to cell phones in various parts of the room. For a second, she wondered if they were phoning each other—campaigns really could make people go
nuts. Another two were tapping away on their BlackBerrys.

Gregory was speaking on a landline. Julia had already scratched out a note and put it under his nose. He gave her an irritated I’m-busy headshake but got the sort of stern response that
only a sixty-year-old grandmother in a button-up pink woollen cardigan could give without uttering a single word. He read her note: “Joshua (?) holding. Re
Close-up
. Urgent AND
confidential.”

“Hold a second?” Gregory asked Isabel. She was on board her jet to Detroit. Whenever he thought about the plane, he smiled. Even now; he couldn’t help it.
The Wall Street
Journal
had christened the jet ‘Big Red’ after the rose icon they’d painted on the tail, but the campaign team had morphed that into the ‘Big Red Bed’ given how
much time many of them spent strapped in it themselves. Originally, Isabel had been scheduled to arrive in Detroit at ten but, as things panned out, she hadn’t even taken off till after
midnight. Gregory read the note again and said to Julia, “This guy for real?”

She shrugged.

“Isabel, gotta call you back,” he said. “Julia, I’ll take it at your desk,” and, after snatching a can of Diet Coke, he sprinted out ahead of her.

Simon introduced himself as Joshua again, no surname. “I don’t know if this’ll help…”

“We’ll check it out. Thanks, Joshua. Hey, where’d you get this?”

“Sorry, can’t say.”

“Can I call you back if I need to?”

Simon had already hung up.

GREGORY got Julia to set up an urgent conference call. Apart from Isabel on the jet, the people he wanted would be at home: Bill Edwards who was probably snug in his
Chippendale four-poster with a cigar and his latest girlfriend (not bad for a 72-year-old) and the campaign’s chief legal-beagle, Oliver Pryor. Gregory chose to leave Hank out of this,
justifying it to himself by assuming he’d be on a sleepover at one of his fancy clubs with no phones. At Gregory’s end, he’d have a half-dozen of his key campaign people listening
in on speaker with him.

Julia loved this job, even though there was no money. At least once in every campaign, there was a crisis on her shift and the sheer adrenaline was reward enough. It was years since anything
else had quickened her heartbeat during that time slot. Her husband had died a decade ago.

Apart from his six senior people, Gregory kicked everyone else out of the War Room. The door closed behind them and the mystified outcasts floated en masse over to Julia; she had to be in on the
gossip since she’d set all this in motion.

“IT’S Professor Robert Dupont.” Gregory intoned into the speakerphone as if he were saying something meaningful. Gregory’s people watched him slipping
on his jacket and knew it wasn’t out of deference to Bill and Isabel who couldn’t see anyhow. It was obviously for ‘The Book.’ When it was all over, Gregory would want the
world to know that at this crucial juncture he was not some tacky underdressed slob. No, tonight he was wearing Armani. “We’ve got word Dupont’s involved.”

“The
Harvard Law
Robert Dupont?” Oliver Pryor spluttered over the line.

Gregory wasn’t sure if the campaign’s chief counsel’s reaction was awe or surprise.

“But he’s on our side,” the lawyer continued.

“Du-who?” asked Isabel, unsure of the name over the squeal of the engines. Her plane had just gone into descent.

This was legal territory, so Oliver Pryor responded, “Dupont, Isabel. Robert Fitzgerald Dupont. Emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard… former senior partner at White,
Flom & Bay… chief counsel on constitutional issues to the National Security Council across two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat… the list goes on. He’s one
of the nation’s most eminent constitutional lawyers. Refused Bush One’s nomination in 1990 to the Supreme Court because it would be too boring. Oh, and he’s, er, my wife’s
grandfather.”

“Then patch him into this call,” Bill instructed.

The lawyer knew this was not a good time to call the crotchety octogenarian but since nobody else was having much of a good time he’d do it. But first he needed the number. The house phone
book wasn’t in its usual spot on the hallstand by the phone, so he had to go hunt for it and, sure enough, it was on his wife’s bedside table. As he slipped it away, she fluttered one
eye open.

After he answered her, she strained at her bedside clock and said, “You’re kidding, right? You want to ring Pa at this time of night… morning? He will
kill
you.”

“He’s against capital punishment, remember,” Pryor joked weakly. He was visualising the old man creaking out of bed, perhaps wearing pyjamas overprinted with his trademark
attire of red, white and blue striped tie, blue shirt and English tweed jacket.

As he tiptoed out, his wife said, “Once you’ve finished the call, place an order for your coffin. Good luck and,” she rolled over on her side, “good night.”

Gregory jotted down the number the lawyer read out and passed it outside to Julia. She phoned Dupont and, without a word, patched him into the conference call the moment he picked up; she
wasn’t getting caught explaining.