The Candidate (19 page)

ERICA IS IN GNN'S BOX at McCormick Place, anchoring the network's coverage. It's all pretty dull, with one speaker after another spouting party-line pabulum. The only piece of suspense is: Who will Ortiz pick as his running mate? Erica has been slipping hints that there may be a surprise pick, but without knowing who it is, she can't go too far out on a limb.

The energy in the hall is pretty subdued and there are hundreds of empty seats. Everyone is waiting for the main event—Mike Ortiz's acceptance speech tomorrow night. Luckily, Erica can throw coverage to the half dozen reporters GNN has down on the floor, where they do one-on-ones with elected officials of all ranks who spout more same old same old.

If Fred Buchanan had lived, this convention would have had true drama. But he was blown into a thousand pieces by a bomber seemingly without a motive, or even a life. And in many ways the country has moved on. Not Erica. She
needs
to feel that she is doing everything she can to find answers and bring some kind of closure to the Buchanan family, to herself, and to the nation. If Tuttle was acting alone, so be it. If not, then his coconspirators must be brought to justice.

During a commercial break Eileen McDermott comes over. “Celeste Ortiz is out in the hallway and would like to see you.”

Erica feels her adrenaline spike. “This could be the news I've been waiting for. Throw it to the floor if I'm not back in time.”

“Erica!” Celeste is glowing like a Christmas tree; she looks like she's just back from a week at a spa. She's carrying a woven picnic basket and she greets Erica effusively, moving toward her to do the air-kiss thing. Erica takes a step back.

Celeste opens one side of the basket—it's filled with gourmet treats. “I threw together a few little goodies for you and your hardworking people.”

I bet you did, Celeste, with your own two hands.

“That was thoughtful of you.”

Celeste smiles like the Cheshire cat. “So . . . the next vice president of the United States is going to be . . . Sally Carpenter!”

Carpenter wasn't on anyone's list of possible picks. She's a two-term congresswoman from northern Florida, dynamic, smart, a real mover, but young and untested. This is big news.

“Can I consider that confirmed?”

“Don't you trust me?” Celeste asks, wide-eyed.

“I'm a journalist.”

“It's a done deal. Can you think of a more exciting ticket? The youth, the energy, the charisma! She's whip smart
.
PhD from Princeton. She was one of the people we vetted, of course, and then she and Mike met and just clicked. They sat and talked for three hours. Why, I'm
almost
jealous.”

“Celeste, I appreciate this.”

Celeste grasps one of Erica's hands. “We appreciate
you
.”

Erica turns to go back into the skybox.

“You forgot your goodies,” Celeste exclaims, pressing the picnic basket onto Erica.

She goes back into the booth and puts it on the crafts services table. On the air, one of the floor reporters is interviewing a congressman,
giving Erica a chance to grab a few sips of water before breaking the VP news. Her phone rings—it's Firewall Partners.

“This is Erica.”

“Gary Goldstein, Erica. In addition to the one found in your shower, we found cameras in your bedroom, living room, and office.”

“What about my daughter's room?”

“Clean. As are the kitchen, dining room, and guest room.”

“Can you tell me anything more?”

“These cameras are the best, state-of-the-art, German made.”

“Do they record sound?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea how long they've been there?”

“Well, they're pristine, no dust or grease on them, so I would say not long.”

“And is there any way to find out where they transmit to?”

“That's the million-dollar question. No. Untraceable.”

Erica hangs up and stands there stunned, horrified, and angry. She feels violated and vulnerable. It's high-tech rape. She calls Becky Sullivan and gets her voice mail.

“Becky, it's Erica, call me as soon as you get this message.”

“You're on in thirty,” comes Eileen's voice though Erica's earpiece.

“Listen, run the
Breaking News
banner. I know who the VP pick is—and it's a surprise.”

Erica returns to the anchor desk, and as she gets ready to deliver the biggest scoop of the convention, she looks into the camera, the camera . . .

. . . the cameras . . . in her office and bedroom and shower . . . the cameras . . .

BACK IN HER HOTEL ROOM, Erica tosses in bed, the sheets twisted and knotty. Despite a rigorous bout of Tae Kwon Do, a dozen hands of solitaire, and a hot bath, sleep eludes her. She's left two more messages for Becky. What kind of game is that girl playing? Erica is ticked off, although she still finds it hard to believe that Becky is responsible for the cameras. She may be a troubled young woman who is obsessed with her boss, but would she really engage in such sophisticated surveillance? Doubtful. She's too needy and insecure. So if she did plant the cameras, somebody must have put her up to it.
But who?

There's an elephant in Erica's psychic room and she can't ignore it any longer. Her denial is crumbling. She's being pulled into something dark and dangerous, just as she was when she investigated Nylan Hastings. She almost lost her life that time. Will her luck hold? How much responsibility does she have to Jenny? To herself? She wishes she could say it's just a job, but it's not. It's so much more. Something evil is going down. Something on a scale that might even dwarf Nylan's sick, vainglorious scheme. So . . . her responsibility is transcendent.

Oh, just forget about it!

In a sudden fury, she throws off the covers and bolts out of bed.
She's not Joan of Arc or Mother Teresa. She's just a hardworking kid who had a lousy childhood, and she has every right to walk away from this. She could get a gig on
Sixty Minutes
and still do some hard-hitting journalism. And be safe. For her daughter, her baby, her still-vulnerable baby. And for
herself
. She has
no
interest in being a martyr. A dead hero.

Yeah right, Erica, like you could let it go now.

She looks at the bedside clock: 3:12. The witching hour. She needs to turn off her brain and get some sleep or she'll be in terrible shape in the morning. And tomorrow is a big day, culminating in Ortiz's acceptance speech. She has a Xanax prescription, but she hates to take a pill; she just hates it. It feels like defeat, almost like a character flaw, an admission of weakness, the first step on the road to a drink.

Get over it—you're not taking the lousy pill to get high. You need sleep!

And so she does take the pill, and falls into grateful if fitful sleep.

The next morning, feeling semi-human, she calls Becky and leaves another message. Then she decides to head down to the hotel's dining room for breakfast. She craves a little hubbub, a little humanity, a little distraction to quell the loneliness and fear. And she'll no doubt run into some colleagues and maybe pick up some hot skinny. As well as congrats for her Sally Carpenter scoop.

The dining room is expansive, bustling and buzzing with politicians, aides, donors, media, political junkies, celebrities—all of them schmoozing, laughing, gossiping, networking. Everyone looks well fed, well dressed, pampered, and buffered in this plush cocoon.

Erica is led to a table for two. She orders coffee and a vegetable omelet and then surveys the room. People smile and wave at her, and she recognizes most of them. A senator from Oregon comes by to pay his respects, then several colleagues from GNN and the other cable news networks. It's all pretty convivial until you look closely and notice the whispered confabs, the intense expressions, the shrewd darting eyes. Make no mistake—this is the big time, where deals are cut, alliances formed, plans hatched.

It all comes down to two words:
power
and
money
. Money and
power. Put them in either order; they are the drugs of choice for this tribe.

Then Erica notices an older Latino couple standing tentatively at the entrance to the room. They're modestly dressed and look like tourists who are splurging on a fancy hotel for their anniversary. They seem a bit uncomfortable, as if they're calculating how much breakfast in this posh birdcage will cost them. The man picks up a menu off the hostess stand and they quickly peruse it. The hostess appears and greets them profusely. The man shakes his head and they turn and leave arm in arm. There's something touching about them; they're so clearly still in love.

Then Claire Wilcox, an old colleague from Erica's first days at GNN, walks by her table. Claire is a raven-haired, Stanford-bred beauty and a first-class rhymes-with-rich.

“Those are Ortiz's parents. Do you
believe
they'll be sleeping upstairs at the White House if he wins? I wonder if they'll put in a taco stand.”

“Nice to see you too, Claire.”

“Kudos on your Carpenter scoop. What'd you have to do to get that one?”

Erica pulls forty dollars out of her purse and leaves it on the table. Then she follows the older couple across the hotel lobby and out onto East Delaware Place. They reach the corner of Michigan Avenue, turn north, and head into the Oak Tree restaurant, a far more modest affair than the Four Seasons. Erica follows them in.

The place is large and modern, filled with conventioneers from around the country, most bedecked with hats and ribbons and signs announcing their allegiance to the Ortiz/Carpenter ticket. There's already a sense of building excitement about tonight's acceptance speech.

The older couple go unrecognized and are shown to a table. Erica heads into the bakery section and checks out the carbs while keeping an eye on her quarry. They seem like such soft-spoken, decent people—it's
hard to imagine them having Christmas Day dinner with their daughter-in-law. Erica takes out her phone and Googles to find their names.

This is the part of her job that she hates, but it
is
part of her job. She walks over to the couple. “I'm sorry to interrupt your breakfast. But aren't you Alberto and Miranda Ortiz?”

“We've been discovered,” Alberto says good-naturedly to his wife—they both smile.

“And we know who
you
are,” Miranda says. She's a buxom woman with smooth coffee-colored skin who—in her seventies—still radiates an earthy sensuality. “We enjoy watching your show.”

“It makes me very happy to hear that. Would you consider coming on as guests sometime?”

Alberto and Miranda exchange glances. “We're pretty private people,” Alberto says.

“It may be difficult to stay that way,” Erica says. “May I sit down and join you for five minutes?”

“No cameras?”

“No cameras,” Erica says, laughing.

“Please,” Alberto says, standing and holding out a chair for her. This man has more class in his pinky than Donald Trump will have in five lifetimes.

“How do you plan to handle the onslaught of attention?” Erica asks.

“Firmly,” Miranda says.

“Nobody asked us to run for parents of the president. We have no interest in that world.”

“We are proud of Mike, but I was happy with him staying in the Senate.”

“He says that his time as a prisoner in Iraq convinced him to run for the presidency,” Erica says.

Both Alberto and Miranda grow silent; their faces darken. “If that's what he says, then we support him,” Miranda says.

“His wife is a strong woman,” Erica says.

Miranda takes a sip of her coffee. Alberto looks out the window.

“Do you think she had a great deal of influence on his decision?”

The Ortizes remain silent.

Finally Alberto says drily, “Celeste is very generous. She has helped many charities in our community.”

“His time in captivity must have been very difficult for you.”

“I never expected to see my son alive again,” Alberto says.

“The worse part was imagining his treatment. My boy, being beaten and filthy and no food or water sometimes. I had to go on medication to control my anxiety and fear,” Miranda adds.

“But he came home,” Erica says.

There's another silence, and then Alberto says slowly, “Yes, he came home.”

“Was he different?”

Miranda puts down her fork, looks at Erica, and says with finality, “He is my son.”

“I understand. And I hope I haven't disturbed your breakfast. Just one last question: Do you know Lily Lau?”

Both Alberto and Miranda stiffen, almost involuntarily. They try to disguise it, but their distaste for Lau comes through loud and clear. There's a long pause.

“When my son was in Congress and then the Senate, he worked to help families who were struggling to make better lives. If he wins, we only hope he will remember those people,” Alberto says.

Erica is moved by his simple words. After a moment she says, “I'm sure he's very proud of you.”

“You see, honey, I told you she was a good woman,” Miranda says.

Erica stands up. “And if you ever change your mind about appearing on my show, the door is always open.”

As Erica walks back to the hotel her phone rings. It's George Yuan from Harvard.

“Hi, George.”

“I'm making slow but steady progress on the translation. The text is extraordinary. It's basically a how-to manual in brainwashing and psychological warfare.”

“Written in 200 BC.”

“Yes! It's books like these that make scholarship so exciting.”

“What have you learned so far?”

“There are five core steps to gaining control of someone's mind: Isolation. Sensory Deprivation. Fear. Indoctrination. Love.”

“Love?”

“Yes. They wanted their subjects to love them as well as fear them. The combination led to complete submission.”

“Fascinating.”

“Numbers were very important to them. Nine was considered the most sacred number. It was dictated that the mind-control process should take exactly nine months and nine days.”

“Interesting.”

“Here's a passage: ‘The subject, upon release, should be able to fit into society with no one suspecting that they are being controlled.' ”

“Sort of like a Trojan horse.”

“Exactly. I took several courses in the history of covert action. The CIA has employed many of these same tactics in its intelligence work.”

The CIA.
Erica knows something of the CIA's methods, of course, but this is the first she's heard of overt brainwashing. She ducks into a doorway. “Say more.”

“In Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, and countries in the Middle East, the CIA was and is known for ‘creating' infiltrators out of local officials. Sometimes it pays off their families. Then it removes them, voluntarily or not, to secret camps, brainwashes them, and then sends them back out as spies and assassins.”

“Do you think the CIA could have operatives in Al-Qaeda?”

“That question is out of my wheelhouse. But I don't see why not. They are the best in the world. And they are absolutely merciless.”

Erica's mind is spinning like a pinwheel in a wind tunnel. Could the CIA be working to put Mike Ortiz in the White House? Peter Tuttle had a life insurance policy, which is much more legit than cash, which is traceable. And it makes perfect sense that the CIA would want Vander out of the picture. In fact, they would want anyone out of the picture who stood in the way of their goal. And Erica knows the CIA is a brilliant killing machine when it wants to be. It never leaves a trace. It's all-seeing, all-knowing.

All-seeing, all-knowing. Even in the shower.

Erica feels herself start to sweat.

“Erica, are you there?”

“I'm here, George. I can't thank you enough. Stay in touch.”

As Erica rides back up to her suite to change into her work outfit, she can barely contain her excitement. Or her fear.