Born to Run (37 page)

ED had planned an exceptional celebration for his dinner companions the previous evening. As always his organisation was impeccable, down to the last detail. Apart from
Isabel’s accident.

After he listened to the message on his voicemail and left the table to speak to the agent who’d left it, and then to the hospital, Ed returned to his seat. He snuffed out his cigar in the
dregs of his cognac, and explained why he had to cut the evening short. Everyone around the table started talking at once, until Ed raised his hand bringing immediate silence. “As I said, the
surgeon’s optimistic.” After a contemplative silence, he stood and they all rose and manoeuvred into two lines, one down each side of the table, and stepped to At-ten-tion! before
saluting him. After returning the gesture, he told them he had a surprise waiting for them at the airport and, without a further word, he turned and led them outside to the line of stretch limos
which had already been packed with their bags. The drivers, not expecting their passengers quite so early, stubbed out their cigarettes and rushed back to their vehicles from under the mushroom
heater on the other side of the driveway.

Niki held back to share Ed’s car and slid in beside him. “How is she really?”

“Like I said, it’ll mostly be trauma. When you cut through it all, the doc says the injuries were bad but largely cosmetic… hypothermic shock, too, but he’s confident
they’ve got it beat…”

“So what’s your surprise?” Niki asked coldly, pulling the tight hem of her black dress down a little under her coat and letting the tips of her fingers rest against his leg
where not even the driver could see.

“You’re all getting a vacation on me.”

“
On
you? Appealing…”

Ed ignored her comment but chose not to move her wandering hand away. “It’s a week on Butaka, starting now. All their wives and girlfriends are in on it, and they’re already
there. I’ll get a jet to take me and Davey, and that fat freak George, over to see Isabel first thing in the morning. But Niki,” he said, arching his eyebrow, “don’t worry.
You’ll find something to do on Butaka.”

“Or someone,” she winked.

THE next morning, Dr Cisco’s
she’ll be fine
still echoed in Ed’s ears. He glanced up at the TV, which had been on mute since he’d arrived at the
hospital. According to the text scrolling along the bottom of the screen, the man being interviewed was Andy Goodman, the local park ranger who’d saved Isabel. “Can we turn that up,
Doctor?”

“I’d rather we didn’t, General. The noise…” Cisco indicated the quiet hum of the sensitive apparatus around them but his resistance had nothing to do with the
equipment. Thirty minutes earlier, when he’d seen this interview clip the first time, Goodman’s brainless performance had discomfited him, and he was only Isabel’s doctor not her
husband, let alone a military hero who, judging by his bearing and the tight pursed lips under his pencil moustache, could probably suffocate an enemy just by sucking in the air from around him.

Ed reached for the remote control and pumped up the volume. Cisco blinked, held his breath and began an intense scrutiny of the ceiling tiles.

Cisco had counted thirteen squares when a newsflash thankfully cut off Goodman’s even more offensive comments.

Cisco’s eyes edged warily back over to Ed, expecting anger over Andy’s distasteful remarks, but Ed’s mask of cold fury sent a shiver up his spine.

B
UTAKA ISLAND’S FRONT-LINE staff had just finished hand-brushing the last grains of sand off the blue welcome carpet on the tarmac when the
jet engines whirred to a hush and its steps lowered. Though it was only sunrise, the temperature was already a comfortable 23°C, lucky for the waiting line-up of the resort island’s
valets, with their perfect bodies and crimson loincloths.

The fifteen valets stepped forward for the traditional welcoming ceremony, sprinkling petals of a rare crimson tulip along the carpet from the steps to each one of the sparkling yellow beach
buggies. That this exclusive Caribbean island didn’t grow tulips was, to those who knew the proprietor, the whole point. And these guests knew him well. They’d all been here before,
mostly with Ed Loane. The proprietor had fought alongside many of them in Grenada in ’83. After discharge, he came here, buying the island soon after and eventually making it off-limits to
all but the super-rich, and his friends.

Mario, who’d been allocated as Niki’s personal valet for her stay, whisked her away to her private grass hut, one of fifteen luxury bungalows scattered in remote seclusion around the
island. Butaka was one of those elite resorts never covered in the weekend travel section. In all these decades, Butaka had never advertised, not once. No journalist had ever been invited, and none
could afford to pay. It had no website, and even managed to appear as a vague unnamed dot on most Caribbean tourist maps. Butaka actively shunned publicity, which played to its privileged
clientele. Any place that could charge so much had to be perfect… and it was. But for Loane’s Rangers there were no charges. Never.

Mario showed Niki through her thatched cottage. She threw her tote bag and black stilettos onto the bed and dismissed him, noting his quiet grace as well as the bulge beneath his loincloth, but
this wasn’t the time. There’d be plenty of that later. With her Red Sox cap planted firmly on her head, twisted to the right as she preferred it, she strolled out onto the fine cream
sand and padded down to her personal strip of surf.

Mario occupied himself by polishing his buggy outside her hut. He wolf-whistled, silently, as he watched her sidle toward the water, the sunrise with enough swing to it so that the black
cocktail dress she’d been wearing since last night clung to her most intimate places. He loved his job.

He leant on the buggy and reassembled himself under his loincloth as he watched Niki wriggle her toes in the 24°C shallows. In the year he’d been here, the waters had rarely fallen
below that. Mario tossed back his wavy black hair and tied an elastic around it at the back. Twisting into the buggy, he grabbed a tube of sun cream from the seat, squeezed a dollop onto his palm
and slowly rubbed it into his hairless chest, waiting. He didn’t have to wait long.

Niki crossed her arms over in front of herself, curled her fingers under the hem of her dress and in one sweep, drew it over her head, careful not to knock her cap off, and flung it behind her
onto the sand. Hmm, Mario nodded. No underwear; he’d won that bet with himself. Niki stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, and her head cocked to the side, insolent to the waking
sun, as though daring it to admit it had met its match.

By the time she slipped into the sea, leaving her cap on her dress on the sand, Mario had unfurled two towels from her bathroom rail and was walking them down to the water’s edge for
her… and hopefully for him.

Service with a smile was Mario’s motto.

D
R CISCO STARED at the hospital room TV, stunned over what he’d just heard. This couldn’t be… Not after… His mind wound
back to the reports of when Andy and Paul had rushed Isabel in. Her panicked intensity. Her demands for a phone. Even the confused ramblings he heard himself before she went under anaesthesia. What
was going on? Cisco was tentative about Ed, but increasingly certain he should mention this. He heaved in a chestful of air but, when he saw the thin smile cracking Ed’s lips apart, he
hesitated.

The door burst open and Davey rushed in. He’d run from the cafeteria where, rather obviously, he’d been shovelling a breakfast of scrambled eggs and crispy bacon into his mouth.

George followed him in, panting, his liver spots blotched over the craze of veins on his cheeks, and his grey ponytail swinging. “Did you hear?” he said, before seeing the TV to
realise they had. “Foster… The White House won’t say where he is,” he puffed. “What if
he’s
dead, too?”

“That’s what they’ve just been asking,” said Cisco, pointing to the TV.

“Do you r-realise…?” stuttered George, shaking his head at the enormity of what he was about to say, “if Foster’s dead, it means Isabel’s…”

“President.”

“It’s incred…”

“It’s justice,” said Ed, tossing a serene shrug and turning to the window, observing the police barrier now encircling the hospital, and the milling security agents and local
cops holding back the growing crowd of onlookers.

Both the doctor and George eyed Ed strangely, but George was less controlled and was about to say something he would have regretted when Davey tugged his sleeve and pointed to the TV. The
nine-year-old had been doing his best to read the announcer’s lips simultaneously with the newsbar scrolling across the bottom of the screen…

I
SABEL
D
IAZ
…
NEXT IN LINE AS
P
RESIDENT OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
…
CURRENTLY UNDER SEDATION AFTER WOLF
…

Meanwhile, the TV commentator—a local—was mid- sentence:

His eyes flashed off camera for a split second.

The Secretary stood on the steps of the Capitol, flanked by the leadership of both major political parties:

The first rang out like a shot:

The Secretary’s eyes moved in a manner that Ed’s interrogation training told him that a lie or an evasion was coming:

Another question immediately hammered at him. It was from an old hand in Washington, who had been around long enough to know personally that a president didn’t actually
have to attend Congress to deliver the State of the Union Address. Carter and Nixon had merely sent their last State of the Union messages in writing, as had Truman, though that was before his
time, and he’d heard that Eisenhower had recorded one of his in a film made when he was recuperating from a heart attack.

The journalist also knew that a president’s address in their first year in office was not formally a State of the Union, but this wasn’t the moment to quibble about
trivia.

“You can assume he will be there,”
said the Secretary.

Even to the untrained eye, the Secretary was looking uncomfortable as he shifted on his feet: