“Who else should know this thing?” Epstein asked both of them. This had been on all their minds. On Perryman’s mind had been the worry how to get them not to tell anybody that they knew anything at all about the Keystone File.
“I wouldn’t tell Niles, Senator, if you ask my opinion honestly,” he said.
Thurston nodded.
“Niles Overton would spread it around. People could read it on his face,” he observed. “He couldn’t keep something this big secret for long.”
“If you can’t tell Overton, your own majority leader, who the hell can you tell?” asked Epstein.
It was a question Perryman had been waiting to answer.
“In my sober opinion, gentlemen—no one.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to go along with Lamar right now. Don’t you think so, Jesse?” he asked, looking at the New Yorker whose opinion he relied on most throughout the campaign besides his wife Peggy.
He was slow to answer, but sat in his seat opposite Perryman rubbing his leg, not sure what to say.
“I guess so,” he said finally, not wanting to, but saying it anyway.
“OK, then,” said Thurston.
Perryman let slip a little sigh of relief.
Disaster averted, he thought.
“We have to go to that meeting with Dumaine now,” said Epstein.
They were due to meet with Senator Bill Dumaine of Massachusetts; a strategy session that had been planned for a week. Dumaine had mounted an aggressive campaign for the Democratic nomination, and, when he fell short, declined Thurston’s offer for the vice presidential slot, leaving it to Thurston to find someone else. But Thurston had had to absorb the snub to get Dumaine to campaign for him. Everyone knew that Dumaine would make a move to become leader of the Democratic Party the minute Thurston lost the election. Both sides were putting on a good face during this difficult period between the deadlocked election and January.
“Yeah. For now, we have to keep Dumaine on our side,” said Thurston.
“For now,” said Perryman.
“Let’s go,” said Epstein.
The minute they left his office, Perryman picked up the phone.
“Put me through to the President.”
* * *
Vlad drove his Toyota Land Cruiser with heavily tinted windows into the underground garage of Derek’s office building in downtown Miami. As planned, Derek was waiting for him by the garage manager’s office. He pulled up and Derek opened the door.
“New car? I like it.”
“I don’t use it very often. I wanted to drive something our mysterious friend won’t be looking for. Get in the back seat and lie down.”
Derek rolled his eyes.
“You really think this cloak and dagger stuff is necessary?”
He complied, however, got in the rear, and lowered his head onto the back seat.
“I do. They think you’re at work.”
They left the garage and a couple of blocks from the office, Kucherov pulled over.
“Get up front now.”
Derek got into the front seat and gave directions. A few minutes later they were parked across the street from Enriqueta’s on Northeast Second Avenue and 29th Street.
“That’s it. Where we meet. Under that little cluster of palm trees.”
“It’s a depressing little dump,” Kucherov said dismissively.
“What can I say? The Cubans love it.”
“You talk out in the open, under those trees?” asked Kucherov
“Sure. Who can hear us out there?”
“I don’t know how, but somebody heard something somehow,” said Kucherov.
“OK. Let me work out a plan,” said Derek. “We will meet the Oyebanjos here and confirm everything. When the Oyebanjos leave the meeting, we will stay behind and talk, maybe you, me, Howard. We will set something up and see if they bite. If they do, we know someone is telling them something or they are getting information somehow.”
“OK.”
Kucherov drove Derek back to his office, making sure he was below the window level when they entered the garage.
“They’ll never know you left.”
* * *
Frederick Thurston was actually morbid. He cancelled all his appointments for a couple of days so he could think. After dinner with Peggy, he sat alone in his study thinking, a half-finished bottle of Black Label before him on his desk.
His meeting that afternoon with the cocksure Dumaine hadn’t helped his mood. For all his posturing, Thurston could tell Dumaine was praying to God that Thurston lost the election to St. Clair. Praying to God. That would give Dumaine a fresh shot at the Presidency in four years. And Thurston would be out of national politics.
Thurston was sick with indecision, which was unusual for the ordinarily quick-speaking senator, usually fast to take a stand before others did. His orderly mind was boggled, dampened, strained with the impact Keystone had made on him, and he wasn’t at all sure what to do to slow or stop Slanetti’s progress.
He saw his vision of the future fade before him as a melancholy cloud descended over him. He felt the stench of this deep morbidity earlier in the day coming up on him, rising in him as some great channel fills suddenly with water when the tide comes in, so he cancelled his engagements to lick his wounds alone.
He was furious with himself for his over-confidence and embarrassed at the swiftness with which he selected his Cabinet and higher agency officials, so sure was he that he was the next President in all but name.
Before his first briefing at the White House, when his mind had been filled with the seemingly limitless possibilities ahead, he searched his mind for every trick he could imagine St. Clair’s people pulling out of Washington’s often dirty hat, but he couldn’t think of a single item strong enough to derail his onward march to victory. The loss of Delamar at first and the others later hadn’t bothered him. Their states weren’t ones he was counting on in the final floor
