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.
Chapter 67
The satellite news-gathering truck and mobile control center were easier to find than Cole would have guessed. When Ryan flicked on the morning news, the sportscaster announced that the UBC NFL Game of the Week was tomorrow at Giant Stadium. The truck was probably already there with the setup crew.
They found the two trucks parked on the service road just inside of the stadium. They had switched cars and pulled a gray station wagon into the parking lot and parked. It was just past midnight on Sunday morning. They sat looking through the windshield at the portable satellite news-gathering dish that sat in the back of a six-wheel pickup and the enormous eighteen-wheel mobile control center attached to a Peterbilt tractor.
'There she is,' Babbling John said, fondly saluting an old friend.
Ryan had worked construction during summers when he'd been playing ball and he had some experience driving heavy equipment. The eighteen-wheel MCC truck had one extra axle but he thought he could handle it.
'Think you can hot-wire a Peterbilt?' Cole asked Lucinda.
'If the ignition wires are under the dash by the key box, I can.'
Ryan had suggested that he and Lucinda should steal the trucks. If they failed and got caught, that would leave the experienced TV journalists Cole, John, and Naomi still at large to try another broadcast tactic.
They watched in silence for about twenty minutes to make sure nobody was guarding the equipment. Then Ryan got out of the station wagon. His leg had stiffened and he felt awkward as he walked around to get the tire iron out of the back. Then he and Lucinda moved across the parking lot toward the trucks.
The service gate was unlocked and they moved inside. Ryan climbed up on the running board and looked into the cab. There was an Acme sleeper behind the front seat with the curtain pulled.
Ryan stepped down and whispered to Lucinda. 'I'm gonna break the glass and open it up. If there's somebody in the sleeper, I'll try and handle him. Stand back,' he said. He hadn't bargained for hitting an innocent driver on the head with a tire iron. He hoped he could control the situation without violence. If there was an alarm, he'd have to turn it off fast.
Suddenly he was flooded with doubts. He thought about Kaz and, once again, wished the ex-fed was with them, growling and chewing the unlit cigar, telling them what to do. Ryan knew it was now up to him.
He swung the tire iron at the window, shattering the glass and the alarm went off, hee-hawing in the still night. The curtain behind the front seat was jerked back and Ryan found himself a foot from a startled man in jeans and T-shirt with a gray beard.
' 'The fuck?' the driver said as Ryan reached in and grabbed him by the front of the T-shirt and yanked him onto the front seat, holding the tire iron at the ready.
'Shut off the flicking alarm,' Ryan demanded.
'Huh?'
