Gordian realized that even he was leaning forward, riveted by the performance. He had wondered earlier if Delacroix would step out of his Boris spiel when he got to this point, perhaps curb the histrionics, but that surely wasn’t going to happen. The senator with the Cajun roots was a showman to the end.
“… crept into Sam’s tent one night when he let down his guard, a night when he was celebrating, a night that was supposed to be about hope and peace and prayers for a glowing new century, and sank his teeth deep into his flesh,” Delacroix was saying. “He ripped at him, tore a chunk out of him, wounded him so badly, scarred him so grievously, that the pain will last forever.
Delacroix stalked over to the bear now, grabbed it by the shoulders.
“Well, I’m not going to let that happen. Decide who to root for, everyone, make up your minds, because I’m getting in the ring with Boris. I’m taking a piece of him. I’m going to show him that his days of feeding off Uncle Sam are through, and that he’d better get on his way once and for all!”
Gordian had thought he was prepared for anything, anything at all, but what he saw next made his eyes open wide.
“Come on, Boris, wrestle me,
Then, the tails of his suit jacket flying out behind him, the tongue of his necktie whipping back over his shoulder, Delacroix took a running leap at the bear, knocking it down, locking his arms around it, tumbling around there before the eyes of the assembled senators, and the astonished observers in the public galleries, and the television cameras, until he’d rolled on top of the stuffed animal and pinned it to the floor.
“It’s over, Boris!” he shouted. “It’s over!”
And watching from the gallery, looking at the rapt faces of the senators, thinking about how Delacroix’s antics would play with public opinion once they made it to the nightly news, Gordian had the sinking feeling that it very well might be.
THIRTY-FOUR
Come on, Boris. Wrestle me. Take me if you can!
Almost twenty-four hours after he had watched Delacroix’s antics on the floor of the Capitol building, Gordian could not get the scene out of his head. This was in part because it had been precisely the sort of sensational media lure he had expected it would be. Every network nightly news broadcast had led off with the story. CNN had done the same, and also made it their topic of discussion on
He had to hand it to Delacroix, who had served two terms as mayor of New Orleans before making a successful bid for the Senate — he had brought a big, glittery suitcase full of Mardi Gras pizzazz to Washington with him, combined it with a sharp instinct for public relations, and turned it into a unique, and perhaps unmatchable, political asset.
Now Gordian tried to make himself comfortable in a commercial airline seat that even in first class wasn’t as comfortable as his own desk chair, and tried to take his mind off the possible ramifications of yesterday’s congressional session. But there was no retreat from his difficulties. What was the line in that poem?
It all seemed to Gordian a painful and distracting waste of time. He and his wife had been married for nearly twenty years. They had raised a wonderful daughter. If they couldn’t make sense of their own lives, how could they expect someone else to do it for them? He recalled the therapists he’d seen after being freed from the Hanoi Hilton, the endless, unendurable decompression program he’d been required to undergo by the Air Force. It wasn’t a memory that gave him confidence. He supposed it had done a lot of good for some men, had little doubt it had, but he’d gotten nothing out of it. Zero.
Still, he needed to make a decision. And knew that the wrong one could result in Ashley leaving him forever.
The voice of the stewardess intruded on his reverie. “Ten minutes until takeoff, make sure your carry-on baggage is stored in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you.” Where the hell was Nimec? After receiving Pete’s late-night phone call in his hotel room, Gordian had exchanged his ticket for a nonstop return flight from D.C. to San Francisco, and gotten booked aboard a connecting red-eye at Kennedy Airport, in New York City. The same plane Nimec was flying on. Or was supposed to be, anyway. Pete had said he had something important for him, and wanted to present it in person. And as soon as possible. Had he always been this damned cryptic? Or, Gordian wondered, could it be that he himself had never felt so jangled and impatient? He knew Pete had been making tremendous progress in New York, and could hardly—
A plain manila envelope dropped onto Gordian’s lap and he once again lost his train of thought. He looked up and saw Nimec standing there in the aisle.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Airport traffic.”
“I wasn’t concerned,” Gordian replied, poker-faced. He lifted the envelope. “This what you said you had for me?”
Nimec nodded, pushed his bag into the overhead compartment.
“Can I open it now, or do I wait for next Christmas?” Gordian asked.
Nimec sat down. He had a local tabloid in his hand. There was a photo of Delacroix under the front-page headline.
“Not that long,” he said. “But I’d hold off till you’re back in your office.”
Gordian tapped the envelope against his knees. Took a deep breath.
“Okay, enough suspense, tell me what’s in it.”
Nimec smiled.
“Very good news about very bad people,” he said.
THIRTY-FIVE
Max Blackburn’s affair with Megan Breen had caught him totally by surprise; it wasn’t quite as though he’d opened his eyes one night and found himself between the sheets with her, but it wasn’t really so different from that either. If he’d been told a month ago, hell, even a
They had never been friends in the past, and the damnedest thing was that he wasn’t sure they were now.
