The Echo of the Whip (18 page)

The domestic audience for the
McGill vs. LAPD
video was even larger than the international viewership, at least for the first 24 hours. Two of the more interested observers sat in hotel rooms separated by 90 miles. At the Santa Barbara Biltmore, Edmond Whelan sipped a Macallan 25, neat. At the L.A. Airport Marriott, Eugene Beck partook of a Smog City Little Bo Pilsner.

Each man offered to himself, aloud, a contradictory sentiment about what he’d just seen.

Whelan said, “That sonofabitch has got to go. Killing him would cut the heart out of the Grant administration.”

Beck said, “That SOB will be almost impossible to kill. I could get my ass shot off just trying.”

Seeing McGill defuse a potentially violent situation with a mob of cops scared Whelan.

Watching the same thing intrigued Beck.

He wondered if he’d have had the nerve to do what McGill had done. Get out of his car with just the one dude. The other guy had to be Secret Service. Still, if things had gotten to the point of a shooting war, McGill and the agent would’ve been cut to pieces.

Of course, it would have taken an overload of testosterone and a complete absence of brain cells to open up on the president’s husband in broad daylight with the whole world watching. Still, that didn’t mean there wasn’t at least one gomer among all those cops who qualified on both counts. Things
could
have gone wrong. About as wrong as wrong ever got.

McGill had to know that. Didn’t matter to him, though. He still made his play.

Guy had to have
massive
gonads.

Pretty good luck, too, the way those army attack birds showed up so fast.

All that was what intrigued Beck.

And scared Whelan.

He would have been even more frightened had he known what the man he’d coerced to kill McGill was thinking. Namely that Beck would solve his problem by taking out the guy who was trying to play him for a sap.

The irony was, Beck, after watching the video, had become
so
fascinated by McGill that he was already thinking of how he
might
do him in. Just as an intellectual exercise. Right?

The answer to that question was: Most likely.

Captain Welborn Yates sat in the right hand seat of the Bombardier Global 5000 as it cruised through the night sky over the Maritime Provinces of Canada. He, his wife, their twin girls, his parents and a gentleman introduced only as Smythe, who shook everyone’s hand and then retired to a private cabin, were the only passengers aboard. The pilot and first officer had brought the aircraft across the Atlantic from London, but once the New World was on the radar an invitation was extended to the guest from the USAF.

“Captain Yates,” the pilot said, “would you like to sit in the right-hand seat to make sure we don’t go astray over North America? We wouldn’t want to cause a bother to American or Canadian air defenses.”

Welborn snapped off a salute and replied, “At your service, sir.”

He’d been hoping all along that they’d let him in the cockpit, if only for a moment, but didn’t want to be pushy enough to ask. He thought the flight crew was showing their appreciation for his good manners. Then the pilot, Group Captain Rowan Davies, RAF (retired), shared with Welborn the fact that the crew had been informed by Welborn’s father, the former personal secretary to Her Majesty, how his son’s career as a fighter pilot had ended.

“Terrible thing that automobile crash taking the lives of your friends and brother pilots,” Davies said. “That and ending your own military flying career.”

“Yes, it was,” Welborn said.

“Smashing how you settled accounts with the blighter responsible.”

Remembering how auto thief Linley Boland met his end, his small boat being rammed by a much larger vessel, Welborn replied, “That’s the word for it, all right.”

Before that discussion could go any further, Welborn saw Davies straighten in his seat. If the pilot had been standing, he would have come to attention. He said, “Yes, ma’am. Immediately.”

He gestured to Welborn to put on his headset. As Welborn did so, having seen Davies’ change in demeanor, Welborn thought the queen must have called for some unguessable reason. His guess had the right degree of prominence, but the wrong side of the ocean.

Davies whispered to Welborn as his headset was going on. “Your president.”

“Madam President, this is Captain Yates. How may I be of help?”

“Please don’t argue with me, Welborn. That would be a good start.”

“Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say.”

“I’ve reviewed your request for promotion, and taken into account your reason for wanting it. Carina Linberg is one smart lady. I’m sorry she’s no longer working for the Air Force.”

“Yes, ma’am. That is unfortunate.”

“As your request was written, however, I’m going to deny it.”

Welborn winced. He’d been all but sure he’d soon be a major. Playing it safe, though, he hadn’t said anything to Kira about it. Now, he was going to have find some other way to —”

The president continued, “I think you undervalue yourself to me and my administration. You’ve probably heard that Vice President Morrissey has announced her candidacy to be my successor.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“My hope is you’ll stay on if she asks you to serve in a capacity similar to what you do for me.”

“I’d be honored, ma’am.”

“Yes, but would you take it, if offered?”

“I’d have to talk with the vice president first.”

“Of course.”

“I’d also have to speak with Kira.”

“Well, as the person who introduced the two of you to each other, I think that’s fair. In any event, I don’t think the rank of major is sufficient for your position. I’ve promoted you to colonel, and as you’ve already promised not to argue, I trust you’ll accept the promotion.”

Welborn tried to keep his head from spinning. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll do my best to honor your faith in me.”

“You must make your parents very proud, Colonel Yates.”

“I try my hardest with them, too, ma’am.”

“Good. Now, see if you can impress Carina Linberg as well.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Group Captain Davies, held a thumb up in front of a questioning facial expression.

He’d been too much of a gentleman to listen in to the president’s half of the conversation.

Welborn returned the gesture.

Then he told Davies, “Let’s see if we can put a call in to South Florida.”

McGill’s phone rang at six a.m. The ring tone was “A Beautiful Morning,” by The Young Rascals. The tune had been a hit in 1967, and the times being what they were, his mother’s obstetrician had it playing in the delivery room when he was born. He’d felt a special attachment to it ever since.

He didn’t even mind hearing it early that day, as he was already out of bed and tying the laces of his running shoes. He, John Tall Wolf and Elspeth Kendry were going for a run before they got down to business. Sweetie begged off, choosing to coordinate family matters with Putnam back in Washington. After the run, McGill planned to have another chat with Mira Kersten and see if his instincts about her being pregnant were on the mark.

Maybe ferret out some other reason for her requesting his help.

He thought Patti might be calling him — from somewhere other than her bath — to share news of great importance. Or just to say hello. Which was also no small thing.

Only it wasn’t the president of the United States calling. It was Mindy Crozier.

So said the ID screen on his phone.

“Hello, Mr. McGill. Sorry for calling so early. Did I wake you?”

“No problem. I’m already up. Just about to go out for a run.”

“That’s cool.”

“Where are you, Mindy?”

“Heading south on PCH.” Pacific Coast Highway. “Coming back from Santa Barbara. A friend and I were on our way to San Francisco when my mom texted. She said you came by our house asking for me. You almost made Mom swoon, being who you are.”

“I try to be careful about that,” McGill told her.

Mindy laughed. “Ha, yeah, that’s cool, too. Anyway, I thought I better come back and talk to you.”

“You don’t have to postpone your trip. We can talk right now.”

“No, that’s okay, we’re almost to Malibu already, and I’d rather talk in person. Where are you going to run?”

McGill had thought to run through residential areas of Beverly Hills, feeling it should be pretty quiet that early in the morning. Now, he changed his mind. “Palisades Park, Santa Monica.”

“Great. That’s right on our way.”

“We’ll be somewhere between San Vicente and the pier. Look for two heart-throb guys and a woman with an automatic weapon.”

“Okay,
that
shouldn’t be too hard to find. Probably hook up within an hour.”

Going down to the hotel lobby, McGill met with Tall Wolf and Elspeth.

SAC Kendry was doing penance, getting up early, for her overzealousness with the LAPD yesterday. She was letting Deke sleep in while she took bullet-catching duty.

Tall Wolf was fine with the change in the running plans.

Elspeth didn’t like that McGill had told anyone where they’d be running.

McGill told her, “Elspeth, you and John are armed. We faced down a hundred cops yesterday. I think we’ll be all right.”

Elspeth asked if she should arrange for another attack helicopter escort.

Carina Linberg thought she was getting too thin. She’d never enjoyed cooking, and the galley on
Irish Grace,
while adequate, didn’t encourage her to prepare more than the most basic of meals: grilled beef, chicken or fish. Salads were limited to two or three veggies. Sometimes just shredded lettuce with bottled Italian dressing. Even her desserts were prosaic. Supermarket pastries and Dove chocolates.

Actually, the chocolates were quite good.

Still, she was thinking of making some changes. As she’d told Welborn Yates, though, there was no way she would sell her boat. If she ever needed to get out of Dodge, metaphorically speaking, you couldn’t beat a seaworthy, well-provisioned sailboat. Small yacht, if you wanted to be generous about the description. You just motored quietly out of your marina when no one was looking, set sail for any point of the compass and you were gone.

With the vastness of the world’s oceans and the profusion of maritime traffic, it would be easy to hide. She wondered what it said about her, though, that she thought she might be on the run from the law someday. She had no criminal record, no intent of acquiring one. Still, at the back of her mind she thought it was a good idea to have a quick getaway handy.

The waitress brought her breakfast: two eggs, bacon, hash browns and a chocolate milk shake. That ought to pack on a few thousand calories. Of course, what she should do was eat
smarter
and get back to exercising more regularly, too. She’d once been able to do a set of ten full-extension chin-ups. Forty pushups. She hoped she could still do a small fraction of both.

She blamed both her discontentment and her itch for self-improvement on Welborn.

Colonel
Welborn Yates.

The handsome, faultlessly polite young bastard had gone ahead and gotten his double-jump promotion. There was only one way in the world that had happened. The president had come through for him. More than he’d even wanted. The commander in chief must have decided a major wasn’t good enough for her pet Air Force officer; so she’d made him a colonel.

Hell, maybe Patti Grant, another older woman, had the hots for him, too.

Nah, she had her own stud fantasy figure. McGill was closer to Carina’s age than Welborn was, but thinking of him didn’t light her up the same way. Maybe she was just a dirty old —

“Colonel Linberg, ma’am. Captain Tinker reporting for duty.”

Her morning breakfast date had just arrived, and honored her with a brief salute.

Charlie Tinker had been nicknamed The Model Marine by more than a few of the women at the Pentagon, military and civilian. He might have been Welborn’s dark-haired older brother. Fashion magazine handsome with a small scar on his chin from a shrapnel nick, he’d set many a lady’s hear aflutter.

Only he’d limited his dalliances with females who worked outside of the federal government in general and the Department of Defense in particular. He and Carina had a friendly but completely professional relationship when they’d both been in uniform. She’d still been in the Air Force when Charlie left the Marines. The whispers were he’d gone to work for the CIA.

Carina had found that rumor plausible, but knew better than to try to verify it.

By the time she had left the service and had gone to work for WorldWide News, she’d heard that Charlie had entered civilian life and established himself as a freelance photographer specializing in war zone images with a sideline in natural disasters. She’d gotten his email address and complimented him on his work. Said they should get together for a drink sometime.

They did just that, and on their second drink Charlie revealed he was gay. Dating women was just a cover for his military days. Now that being a gay Marine was acceptable …

He would be coming out publicly the next day.

Another possible romance for Carina shot to hell, but they remained good friends.

Charlie lived down in South Beach and was happy to accept the breakfast invitation when Carina called. He kissed her cheek and took a seat in the booth opposite her. Then he looked her over and gave his right hand a small side-to-side waggle.

“What?” Carina asked. “I look that bad?”

“You were born too gorgeous to ever look bad, but you’re not happy. You’re letting yourself go a little.”

Carina took a long slurp of her milkshake. “I’m sure you could fix me right up, only you
weren’t
born that way.”

Charlie grinned. “I have straight friends, if you’d like an introduction or two.”

“I’ll let you know.”

The waitress came and took Charlie’s order. She gave him her best smile and even managed to sneak in a light touch of his arm. Never knowing both flirtations were wasted efforts.

“Men,” Carina said when the waitress had departed, “even the gay ones.”

“Now, now. Right after we eat, I’ll sneak you into Homestead.” The U.S. Air Force base in South Florida. “We’ll steal a B-2, and you can drop bombs on anybody you please.”

Carina laughed. “That’d cheer me right up.

“How about you let me share your breakfast and then you can share mine?”

“That way your new little friend will know you’re spoken for?”

“Yeah, and we can talk about why you wanted to see me without my going hungry.”

Carina pushed her plate to the middle of the table. Charlie took a piece of bacon.

“I’ll understand if you can’t help me, but what I’d like to know is anything you might know about our government’s spooks working as assassins.”

Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “You might have to buy me
dinner
for that.”

“Or we could discuss the subject hypothetically, if you’d feel more comfortable.”

“What’s going on here, Carina?”

Charlie took a look around the diner, as if someone might be closing in on him.

Only the waitress was, back with his order in a flash. She moved Carina’s plate back to her side of the table, but got the message it was meant to send. Not a quitter, though, she still beamed at Charlie.

As soon as she left, Carina said, “A friend who’s still in uniform asked for my help. If I give you a little bit of the situation, can I trust you to keep it to yourself?”

“I’m gay, but I’m not a gossip,” Charlie said.

“Good to know. A certain person highly placed in the government is being threatened with death. This is someone who has certainly been threatened before, but this one is being regarded more gravely than most. The word is, it could be somebody connected with our own intelligence community who might actually make an attempt.”

“JFK and the CIA all over again?” Charlie asked.

Carina spread her hands. “I’m just an intermediary, but the person who contacted me about this isn’t a conspiracy nut.”

She took a piece of bacon from Charlie’s plate.

He said, “The only way I could see something like this happening is if somebody from the fringe is being used.”

“Someone who’s
not
a serious threat?” Carina asked.

“Didn’t say that. Look, did you ever wonder what happens to all the guys who try to join special forces units but don’t make it?”

“They go back to their old outfits, do their old jobs?”

“Some do, but a lot separate from the services altogether.”

“Disappointment will do that,” she said, knowing military misfortune all too well.

“Yeah, well, some big thinker at the Pentagon thought it was a waste of manpower, at least when it came to the guys who missed out making special forces by a whisker. All that training and a lot of skills and talents walking out the door, it seemed unproductive.”

“When you say a whisker, how close are we talking?” Carina said.

“Close enough to make a man bitter. I heard a story about this one guy. He did
everything
right, aced the training, passed all the tests, qualified down to the smallest detail.”

“But?”

“But he whistled while he worked. At least when he wasn’t supposed to keep quiet. Other guys would be grunting and wheezing from busting a gut; this dude would be whistling a merry tune. They thought he was a mite unbalanced, but not in a militarily useful way. So they washed him out.”

“Did he take it hard?” Carina asked.

“That’s the thing. The powers that be saw to it that someone met him as soon as he cleared the post gate. Offered him an interesting job at a salary the chairman of the joint chiefs doesn’t get.”

“Who makes that kind of offer?” Within a heartbeat, Carina answered her own question. “A private security firm with a very fat government contract?”

Charlie didn’t say a word, barely nodded.

From her own intelligence background, Carina was able to draw other conclusions. “This whistling guy was far from the only one to get that kind of job offer. If the special forces people are the super-elite, the guys who just missed are the near super-elite. Damn, the guy who thought up this program was earning his salary. You get high quality personnel and if one of them screws up you’ve got political deniability and probably no grieving widow to go on TV.”

“See that,” Charlie said. “Not only are you still beautiful, you’re as smart as ever.”

“Yeah, thanks. But I haven’t figured it all out yet, have I?”

“Take another sip of your milkshake. Maybe something will come to you.”

Carina did, and the rush of cold sugar and chocolate did stimulate her.

She smiled and told Charlie. “You didn’t just pull this whistler guy out of your hat for no reason. If his only flaw was an overdeveloped love of music, he must have been about the best of the guys who didn’t make the cut. So what was his name?”

“Don’t think I ever heard it,” Charlie said, “but I do recall he was one of your kind of people.”

Retired Colonel Carina Linberg made the connection. “Air Force.”