He turned his gaze back on Briggs. “Well, he did get a little sloppy, recently. He’s used the same phone for a bit too long. And we’ve been tracking some of his calls. Still can’t quite listen in—there are some legal issues there, for one thing—but we can tell who he calls, and when.” He took another long puff, still staring Briggs down. The senator looked suddenly ill, and couldn’t meet Abernathy’s eyes.
“Care to explain why you’ve been talking with a terrorist on the Most Wanted list, Senator? We know which numbers are your ‘secret’ phones, too, by the way.” Abernathy watched the senator as he took another deep puff on the cigar. “And we know that you’ve been using the same phone to talk to your worthless, coke-dealer cousin, too.”
Santelli watched the play of emotions cross Briggs’s face. Shock turned to fear, to anger, to cunning, and back to fear as he watched Abernathy’s face.
“Don’t even think about it, Briggs,” Abernathy snapped. “I’ve got copies and copies of copies. And while some of those are in the hands of otherwise disinterested parties who will dig into something that smacks that heavily of serious compromise, others are ready to be delivered to political opponents of yours, who don’t really give a damn about the ethics of the situation, but would love to see you go down.”
Briggs’s face had gone still and gray. “What do you want? You wouldn’t be in here talking to me if you didn’t have something in mind.”
“I want to know what the game is. I want to know how thoroughly compromised you are. I want to know how deep this goes. What was the deal? Cocaine for a dead rival? What?” Abernathy sat up, leaning forward through the cloud of cigar smoke.
Briggs looked around the room, meeting Van Zandt’s and Santelli’s eyes, if only for a moment each. He turned back to Abernathy, as if he was trying to judge whether the old man was serious.
He was. And Briggs knew it. He seemed to shrink a little. “It was nothing like that. After I found out about the coup, I started to speak out about it. Some of my constituents were getting a little heated—after all, there’s supposed to be a peace deal with the FARC. And that was part of the problem. The situation there is very delicate, and I recognized that. I warned against destroying the peace with the FARC, and antagonizing the Venezuelans.
“Then he reached out to me. I never learned his name. He said he was one of the revolutionaries, and that he was concerned about the way things were going. He said that Clemente was losing his mind, that he didn’t really stand for the revolution anymore.” Briggs seemed to wilt a little bit more. “He promised that if I managed to quietly take Clemente out of the picture, he could bring things under control. I could hint at some black operation that of course I couldn’t talk about openly, score some political points, and he’d at least tone things down for stability’s sake.”
“And you believed him.” Contempt dripped from Abernathy’s voice. Contempt, and something more. He didn’t believe Briggs for a second.
Santelli suddenly remembered Abernathy’s reference to Briggs’s “worthless, coke-dealer cousin.”
“There’s a fine line that statesmen have to walk to make things happen!” Briggs was getting some of his bluster back.
“Oh, right. I forgot about how you never met a dictator you didn’t like to bargain with.” The old general took another long puff. “It’s a nice act, Senator, but don’t forget that I know that you’ve been covering for your cousin’s drug-running for a while. I’m sure that has nothing to do with this.” Abernathy sneered. “Well, here’s a slightly less morally compromised bargain for you. Since you did hire General Van Zandt’s associates to take down a Communist/narco dictator, some good is going to come out of it. So, on the condition that you don’t even think about or mention said associates ever again, and certainly don’t initiate any action to retaliate in any way for messing up your little sweetheart deal, then the information about your association with Galvez need never become public.” He took another puff. “Believe me, Senator, you’re getting off light this way. I can bury you, and I will if you cross me.”
Santelli wasn’t entirely sure what to think about this little byplay. Abernathy had certainly always struck him as a hard old cuss, but this was a level of ruthlessness that he hadn’t quite imagined. And he wasn’t sure if he liked it.
On a fundamental level, Carlo Santelli was a simple man, with simple and clear ideas of what constituted justice. And that this corrupt bastard, who had made a deal with a terrorist—and while he certainly hadn’t said as much, Santelli suspected that the Blackhearts were supposed to get sold out somewhere along the line as part of this deal—was going to walk, scot free, bugged him. Deeply.
But if there was one thing that he’d learned in almost three decades in the military, most of them as a Staff or Senior NCO, it was that sometimes you had to take the little victories and ignore the little defeat that was the tradeoff.
Briggs stared at Abernathy for a moment, almost as if he were in shock that he—Senator and Important Person that he was—found himself at the mercy of an old soldier who was even more ruthless than he was. But he hadn’t gotten where he was by being a complete idiot when it came to this sort of thing. He knew when he’d been outmaneuvered. And he knew what he had to lose if Abernathy wasn’t bluffing.
He nodded, but behind the fear and the defeat, there was a little flicker of hate in his eyes as he acquiesced.
There would be a reckoning for this.
