of blood trailed from her broken nose in the murky green water. Brown eyes gaped open, staring directly at him as if they’d always known his secrets.
Drake broke the surface gasping and choking. Two members of his protective detail had worked their way down to the water’s edge and stripped off shoes and suit jackets to dive in after him.
“Kathleen!” he sputtered and croaked in what was hardly an act as he tried to catch his breath.
A black agent named Norton pulled him into the shallows and passed him off to a partner before sloshing into deeper water to go after the woman they called “The Missus.”
“We’ll get her out, sir,” he yelled over his shoulder before diving into the blossoming circle of bubbles.
The athletic young officer surfaced a short time later with Kathleen in tow.
Sirens wailed forlornly in the distance as Drake stood on the bank shivering with someone else’s suit coat over his shoulders. The four members of his Secret Service detail worked frantically to revive the sodden lump of flesh that had been his wife of over twenty years.
For one terrifying moment he thought Norton might succeed in bringing her around. In the end, the earnest officer looked up in between rescue breaths and gave a solemn shake of his head. Water dripped from the end of his nose. He kept up his efforts but knew it was over.
Drake fell back against the grassy bank, landing on the seat of his pants. His protection detail would assume he’d collapsed out of grief for his dead wife. Instead, a wave of nauseating relief flooded his shivering body. Events had fallen perfectly into place. Driving off the road had been more exhilarating than he’d imagined. As an added bonus, he’d lost his dear wife. No one would question him too deeply about why he’d lost control of the car.
He would now be seen not only the leader in a crusade against those who would harm the United States, but a widower whose beloved companion had been murdered by those very subversives he had in his sights. The naysayers in the military and elsewhere would be silent now or risk the wrath of public opinion.
Hartman Drake took a deep breath and willed his body to calm. He scanned the trees on the side of the bank, wishing his mentor was there, to see how well he’d done. He thought of his youth and the man who had seen his genius and saved him from a life of starvation-a man who had taught him the one true way and brought him to America for a mission far greater than he’d comprehended at the time. Dr. Nazeer Badeeb, his longtime friend.
Their impossible plan was finally coming to pass. The president and vice president would not survive the evening. As the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, Drake was poised to take the reins.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Laurel, Maryland
Julia Sanborn held her rhinestone-encrusted Coach purse under her arm. She pressed the key fob to unlock her car door with one hand while she talked to her sister on the cell phone with the other. The gray street outside her apartment was deserted. Her heavy heels echoed on the grimy pavement as she sashayed out from her second-story walk-up like she owned the world. Spits of rain clung in tiny droplets to the shimmering black of her pixie-cut hair.
The fob didn’t work, so she unlocked the Mitsubishi sedan with the key.
“I know, I know,” Sanborn yelled into the cell phone as if she was deaf. “I got bills to pay, you know. He’ll just have to, like, get that through his head or else I’ll show him I mean business…”
She tossed the handbag into the passenger seat and hiked up her short skirt to maneuver her legs in behind the wheel. “I know… I know…”
She stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, but nothing happened. She kept talking while she tried again. “Can you believe it? I mean, like, I have the pictures to prove it… No… Of course I’m naked in the pictures… Of course we are. Yeppers… I know, really… I’m tellin’ you, he’s, like, some kind of stud… No, you can’t see the pictures. I told you, I’m naked too…”
She turned the key. Again, nothing happened.
“Listen, sis, I’m gonna have to, like, call you back. Can you believe this? My damn car won’t start. Yeah, really, I’ll just get him to buy me a new one.”
Sanborn ended the call and put the phone on the seat beside her purse. She tried the key one more time. Not even a click. “Come on.” She smacked the steering wheel with both hands. “Why does the bad shit always have to happen to me?”
At that moment, the dark form of Mujaheed Beg rose up from the backseat and looped a thin twisted cord around the delicate skin of Sanborn’s throat.
“Because you are greedy, my dear,” he grunted as he fell backward. The cord crossed behind her neck, terminating in two hardwood handles he used to jerk it tight.
Sanborn’s eyes slammed wide in the rearview mirror. Gaudy fingernails clawed frantically at the biting twine.
Beg would have used the piano wire, but he knew from experience that such material would cut through the woman’s flesh like soft cheese. With so much yet to do, this was no time to find himself awash in blood inside the close confines of the car.
He nodded in satisfaction as Sanborn tried to honk the horn. Good for her. But he’d disabled that along with the battery. Her back arched. Feet pedaled against the floorboard, kicking blindly. Pinned back in her seat there was little she could do. Beg himself knew of no way to defend against such an attack-but he was smart enough to check the backseat before he got into a car.
The beauty of a garrote was the silence of its simplicity. There were no screams to raise the alarm. If applied correctly, by the time a startled victim opened her mouth, the unforgiving cord had already crushed the windpipe and pinched both carotid arteries. Her brain denied oxygen and blood, Sanborn fell unconscious in seconds. Beg held his grip for two full minutes, humming “Treat Me Nice” under his breath. Sweat from the exertion of the killing beaded along the dark lines of his forehead and dripped from the end of his nose.
Sanborn died with her eyes open, her once bright face purple and taut with terror.
Beg rolled the thin cord around the two grip sticks on either end and stuffed it back in the pocket of his loose jacket. He shoved the dead woman so she toppled over into the passenger seat, her arm trailing into the floorboard on top of a Wendy’s hamburger sack. Grabbing her purse so the incident would look like a robbery, he walked quickly down the shadowed street.
A block away he ducked down the alley behind a CVS drugstore. Earlier that day, while Sanborn had been away, he’d taken an envelope containing the illicit photos of her and Drake from under her mattress. In her purse, he found the thumb drive that was surely her backup. For a blackmailer, she was highly unsophisticated.
Beg snapped the thumb drive into an adapter on his smartphone and scrolled through the contents. He shook his head at the woman’s stupidity. The files weren’t even password protected. The metadata showed the photos had been printed twice-that accounted for the set mailed to Drake and the set he’d found hidden under her mattress.
He scrolled through the photos again, looking at each one carefully. He was glad he’d killed Sanborn without spending any time with her. She was a whore and he had no use for that sort of woman.
He took the thumb drive out of his phone and dropped it to the pavement, crushing it beneath his heel. His mind wandered to the jasmine scent of Veronica Garcia as he dialed Badeeb’s number. She was a woman he would soon spend some time with. His crooked mouth perked at the thought.
Badeeb picked up. “Peace be unto you,” he said. The sound of him exhaling a lungful of cigarette smoke fluttered on the other end of the phone.
“And to you,” Beg said, pressing on with business lest the doctor spend the next ten minutes on their greeting. “I took care of the problem with the photographer.” He was careful not to use Hartman Drake’s name on an open phone line.
There was a long pause. “Cleanly, I trust.”
Beg shook his head, sighing. “Of course,” he said. There was no truly clean way to kill another human being. “In any case, your man is free to pursue his goals without her interference.”
