The Plan

Chapter 66

Madison Junior High School was a one-story monument to brown stucco and bad design. The video lab was on the east side of the campus in something called the Learning Center. When John Baily opened the door an d s witched on the lights, Cole Harris knew he was in trouble.

The lone camera was a ten-year-old Trinitron on a rolling foot stand. The recording equipment was three-quarter inch but also very old. The area the students were using as a s tudio was just a wall covered with dull green paper.

"Ain't exactly UBC Central, is it?" Cole said. John grunted. All of the other equipment was outmoded, but John promised he could make it work.

Cole set up a work table on the far side of the room and handed John the half-inch cassettes of Meyer meeting with the Mafia princes.

"I need to get this onto three-quarter for editing."

John took the tape and moved to the back of the video lab. Naomi sat behind the desk and turned on an old Apple computer. Ryan and Lucinda moved around the room, feeling useless.

"Want me to write the copy?" Ryan volunteered.

"I'll do it," the IR said. He always wrote his own stories. "This is gonna take an hour, maybe two."

Ryan and Lucinda walked out of the video lab and found a bench outside that overlooked the moonlit playing field. Ryan turned and looked at her for a long moment, not sure exactly how to start what he wanted to say. He had been worried about something for almost two days.

"I want you to know something," he said, his voice blowing away from him in the light wind. "I owe you my life. I can't tell you how close to the edge I was when I got on that plane in Burbank. Somehow, you got the lights back on."

"There's no charge for that."

"I know this nightmare is coming to an end. . and somehow I know that it's going to come down to Mickey and me."

"Maybe it's just your sense of drama at work. . the bad guy has to confront the good guy. It won't happen that way." She didn't want that to be the way it ended, because Ryan would lose. She knew nobody could beat Mickey. Nobody ever had.

"Maybe not. But I've been having strange thoughts about it. I'm going to have to stop him. He won't let it end any other way, and I don't think I can do it without killing him."

Somewhere in the darkness a hoot owl sent up a mournful orchestration.

"What are you asking me?" she finally asked. "If that happens, can you still love me?"

Lucinda reached out and took his hand. It was very cold in the darkness. "Love isn't something you control. It doesn't turn on or off. Love is something that happens. It's there, whether you want it to be or not."

The hoot owl sang a lonely chorus.

"Ryan, two months ago, if you'd asked me that question, I would have had a different answer. Two months ago, I was living in a fantasy, even though the evidence was right in front of me. I'd been protected by my family f rom everything. And then all of this happened. I've had to say good-bye to that fantasy."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. . You didn't ask for this any more than I did. I won't say it hasn't been hard. Those first days after Jerry Paradise came aboard your boat, I was waking up at night wondering how my brother could have sent someone to kill me. And I can still remember the good things. . He could be charming and funny. . He made me laugh when I was little. But, Ryan, he was acting. I know now he feels nothing for me or anybody else." She looked away for a moment before continuing. "He laughed after Rex was shot. He tried to kill us." She turned to look out at the frozen, brown field. "It really hurt. But now I see that all of the things I loved about Mickey and my father were created by them to manipulate me. I know that if Mickey controls the presidency, he'll destroy everything this country stands for."

She looked at him squarely. "But most of all, I know that I love you. More than my life. Or anything in my life. If it ends badly, at least I found you."

They heard the predator's wings beating a whispery cadence. Ryan and Lucinda looked out into the darkness. At first, they couldn't see him; then the huge hoot owl passed for a second between them and the moon.

"There he is," Lucinda said in awe as he drifted by, throwing a moon shadow across the frozen field.

Mickey knew that the final confrontation to save his father's plan was going to be up to him. He had grossly underestimated Ryan. The fact that Lucinda had crossed over and was now against him fueled a strange remorse. . It had consumed him for days, and he had finally identified it as anger. Anger was an emotion, and Mickey had never had to deal with emotion before. It sat in his stomach and gnawed on his insides. Revenge. Ravenous, uncontrollable. He needed to get even.

Ever since he'd found out he was a sociopath, he had studied up on the condition. He learned that sociopaths often had IQs in the genius or near genius range. He learned that they often became great actors and could fake emotions that others felt, allowing them to manipulate and control people. Sociopaths, he learned, could lie and scheme, even kill, without paying any internal price.

In one book, titled Aberrant Psychology, he had stumbled across a strange chapter in which a psychiatrist wrote that past the age of forty, sociopathic behavior tends to disappear. The subject becomes normal. He or she learns to feel, much like any other human being. The doctor called his discovery a hopeful breakthrough, but the thought terrified Mickey. The idea that this gift he had come to cherish above all others might disappear haunted him. He would lose a tremendous edge. He had always been able to select targets analytically, attack them viciously, and suffer no remorse.

He sat in his father's study looking at the paintings Joseph had collected. Oils depicting Palermo Harbor and the fields around Naples. He'd called a meeting to discuss a way to find Ryan. The men waiting downstairs would kill for Mickey.

Mickey walked into his father's bathroom and looked into his own eyes. He looked at the round face, the oily hair, the pudgy fingers. He held his hands out in front of him. The sight of his own trembling fingers shot a new feeling through him. Fuck, he thought Then a new emotion hit him. It made his stomach freeze. An electric charge buzzed his nerve endings. It made his sweat turn cold.

For the first time, Mickey Alo tasted fear.

Haze Richards was having the time of his life. He was at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, meeting with world leaders at an ad hoc financial conference that A. J. had arranged.

When Haze spoke, people stopped talking. He had a limited grasp of world economics, but A. J. had given him some key facts and observations. Men who already ra n t heir own governments fell silent and made notes while he spewed out prepackaged ideas.

Despite being a horrendous pain in the ass, A. J. had been right. He'd kept Haze on the front pages and on the covers of national magazines. Shots of the candidate with Boris Yeltsin and Francois Mitterrand or with the heads of OAS and NATO appeared everywhere. He was introduced to the most beautiful women in the world. He signed autographs like a movie star.

But A. J. had been less reliable of late. He was drinking heavily. He'd missed a staff meeting two days before. They'd found him passed out in the hotel bar. A. J. was going to have to go.

Haze was in the Imperial's presidential suite with its twenty-foot-high ceiling and ornate paintings. The arched windows commanded a view of the picture-book city. The floor of the main room had an inlaid wood surface and was half the size of a basketball court. Ten-foot-high portraits of various Hapsburgs hung on the walls. Napoleon, he'd been told, had slept in the huge bed in that very room when he'd been in Vienna in 1797. . Kennedy, Eisenhower, DeGaulle, and Churchill, as well as just about every famous ruler in three hundred years, had wandered these floors and looked out of the arched windows. And now it belonged to Haze Richards, the next President of the United States of America.

The election was two weeks away, and Haze was scheduled to return home the next morning. The staff wanted him to make a quick swing through the farm states, where they were showing a slight weakness; but everywhere else, he was way ahead. It looked like Haze was going to chair a blowout over Pudge Anderson.

He went into the bedroom, flopped down on the canopied bed, and started doing his daily regimen of fifty stomach crunches.

Two more weeks. Thirteen days. Three hundred twelve hours and Haze Richards would be the forty-third President of the United States of America. "Whatta fucking country." He grinned.

He was flat on his back, doing aerial bicycles, right in the middle of the bed where Napoleon had once slept.