We can and will gladly nail you on a golden cross, he would be warned with a solemn shrug. Big Wall Street guy in a lavish house in a fancy neighborhood in a plush little town filled with celebrities and the hyper-rich. Wow, don’t Springsteen and Bon Jovi live around here? You see, Jack, you have a lot to lose. Go ahead, call the lawyer; then we call the local cops. Won’t the neighbors be happy when your driveway floods with flashing blue lights? How many will peek out their windows and gawk at the spectacle as you are dragged out your front door in cuffs and stuffed in the back of one of those cars?
And how will your Wall Street chums and bosses react the next morning when the DEA crashes into your office, flashing another warrant and poking around for more evidence? Imagine the horrified looks on their rich, stuffy faces. What’s the matter, guys, didn’t you know your partner was a pusher? Wouldn’t that do wonders for business? The clients would love it.
DEA just adores guys like you. A Wall Street hotshot, a big-deal millionaire taking a careless stroll through the gutter. Maybe not page one news. But an honorable mention in the Wall Street Journal is the least you can expect, and the last thing you can afford. They will do their best to smear you across every rag on the East Coast and make you the toast of New York.
DEA has you by the balls, Jack would be assured once again with a confident sneer. If you wish to call your lawyer-okay, fine, it’s your constitutional right, go ahead. Be sure, though, to tell him to meet you at the local police station after you’re already booked and charged with possession with intent to distribute, and the reporters are already jockeying in an unruly mob outside the station waiting to get a nice photo of the celebrity pusher.
So what will it be, Jack? Your lawyer or us? A noisy mouthpiece who can’t lift a finger as you’re publicly flayed and disgraced, you’re fired from your job, and have to sneak in and out of your own home-or will you be an upright citizen and work with us, Jack? We want the pusher you bought this from: the big-time guy at the top of the dope chain. And the names of every one of your customers sure would be nice. A big fish or two would really hit the sweet spot.
No rush, Jack, relax, take a day or two, think about it. Then we’ll be back.
They would let Jack suffer and stew for a day or so-let him lock himself into his house, blow off work, imagine the terrifying possibilities, and scream at the walls about the injustice of it all.
Then would come the surprise visit from smiling Bill Feist, world-class fixer, all jokey and amiable as ever. Just dropped in to see how you’re doing, he would inform Jack. Hey, he would add with thinly feigned innocence, an old buddy in the DEA mentioned that you got your tit in a wringer. Sounds serious, Jack. Five pounds, huh? Those fellas don’t mess around, but maybe I can help. Pull a few strings, call one of my many old White House chums, you know, make this whole mess disappear.
At CG we value our friends: of course, it’s a two-way street.
It was crude and brusque, but it would work; Jack had far too much to lose for it not to. The house, the job, the all-American reputation-best of all, as Jack would eventually figure out, this sweet deal he was flashing around would go out the window. As a felon, he would lose his broker’s license and certainly be barred from directorship of a public company.
He would know he was being framed and blackmailed, and be understandably outraged. But so what? What choice did he have?
It had worked like magic four out of five times. It hadn’t exactly failed the fifth time, it had simply worked in a way nobody anticipated. In that case, the CEO of a large rubber company CG was interested in, a proud, stubborn, and resistant man who had just been informed by the ersatz agents of TFAC of the stiff punishment for being caught red-handed with kiddie porn on his computer hard drive, had sneaked into the dark shed behind his house, tossed a rope over a rafter, and hanged himself.
Maybe he had a guilty conscience.
Too bad.
Fortunately the amenable man who succeeded him the next day promptly accepted CG’s offer.
“Two days?” Walters asked, pushing back his chair and clasping his hands behind his head. “Why not tonight?”
“Don’t rush things.”
“Maybe he’ll accept another offer in between.”
“He won’t.”
“How can you be so-”
“Because I know how he thinks,” Bellweather insisted with a confident grin. “Jack intends to gather the offers, then he’ll be back at our door. We have time.”
Early in the morning of day eight, Jack gave his watchers the slip. It did not appear intentional, certainly not planned, but a car whipped into his driveway at 5:05, Jack dashed out the front door and jumped in the passenger seat, and the car squealed away.
The watchers strained to get the license number, but between the darkness, their drowsiness after another long dreary night, and the fact that the plate was splattered with mud, it was hopeless. The car was a late-model Mercury Sable, dull gray in color, assuredly not a hired limo, and thus presumably was driven by a friend or acquaintance of Jack’s.
By the time the watch car idling around the corner received the order to give chase, any hope of catching up was futile.
Floyd Thompson, the driver, turned to Jack and said, “Long time no see, Captain.”
Jack smiled at him. “Four years, Floyd. What’ve you been up to?”
“Same old, same old.”
“How was Afghanistan?”
“Is that a question?”
Jack laughed. Fifteen years earlier he had served beside Floyd, back when Floyd was a newly promoted buck sergeant, E-5, and Jack was his commander. Now Floyd was an E-8, on the list for promotion to sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank in the Army. The first wisp of gray salted his temples, though he still looked as fit as he had at 23.
“Ike and Danny can’t make it this time,” Floyd informed him. “Ike’s in Afghanistan, Danny’s doing Iraq.”
“Some guys will do anything to get out of this.”
Floyd smiled. “Miss it?” he asked with a quick glance at Jack. “I mean, the life.”
“Which part? The early morning five-mile runs, sleeping on the ground, lousy pay? Frequent tours to countries I wouldn’t send my worst enemies to? Being shot at?” Jack paused, then smiled. “Sure, who wouldn’t?”
Floyd laughed and they caught up on their lives and drove generally westward for two hours, eventually ending up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, at a small, obscure country cemetery on the outskirts of town. The morning was cool and blustery. A light drizzle was coming down. A small knot of people had already arrived and were milling around in the rain by the parking lot.
Like Floyd, four of the men wore Army uniforms bedecked with ribbons and military merit badges and a long procession of time stripes on their sleeves. And two, like Jack, wore suits appropriate to their current status as former soldiers, now civilians.
The men filed over and they all shook hands but said few words. Next they all marched solemnly to a gravesite where a woman, Selma Gaither, was standing, using the moment of solitude to share private thoughts with the man in the grave, her husband, Thomas Gaither, former staff sergeant and a former comrade of the men in the group.
It was a ritual they adhered to every four years, coming together at Tom Gaither’s final resting place, a way to honor a fallen friend. Floyd shuffled behind the gravestone and managed to produce a few simple words, then started crying; he just managed to choke out a barely coherent amen. He and Tom had joined the Army together, a pair of stout defensive linemen at Salisbury High School looking for a new life. They had grown up on the same block, raised hell as teenagers, barely escaped high school, then gone off to war under a stint the Army called the Buddy Program.