SNAP! BOBBY FOSTER and his inner-circle were ensconced in the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters in Atlanta, behind floor-to-ceiling glass, partitioned from the bustle and clatter of the scores of volunteers working the phones. SNAP! Though neither Foster nor his running mate Mitchell Taylor hailed from Georgia, their strategists had picked Atlanta to boost their support in the South. Maine was Foster’s home base and Mitch Taylor was an Iowa boy.
SNAP! The venetian privacy blind was yanked right up so—SNAP!—the “mamarazzi”, celebrity photographer Niki Abbott, could take whatever candid shots she wanted yet still be out of earshot of campaign strategy. As always, her blue, signed Ted Williams Red Sox baseball cap was pressed down over her flaming red hair.
“Yes!” Mitch Taylor fisted the air with a spirited air-punch and shot a glance out of the corner of his eye to check if Niki had captured the moment for posterity. His victory cry would have made more sense if the Foster-Taylor team’s polling had clicked over 50 percent rather than just 28 but, from the doldrums their campaign had previously been lolling in, any rise needed celebrating.
“Thank yo-ou, Judge Thomas,” Taylor chuckled. The vice-presidential running mate winked at Don Thomas, the wily political strategy brain who headed up Foster’s campaign machine. Don was a seasoned operator. He was also the judge’s brother.
But Don, a lantern-jawed Kentucky boy, winced at the hint of complicity. Not in his family. No way. His brother had tossed out the Karim Ahmed case because that’s how he cut the evidence. It had nothing to do with his political sympathies or even Don’s job. Not with his brother’s fierce love for the law above all else. It was why no one, not even Ahmed’s defence team, had asked Judge Thomas to recuse himself from the case.
Yet Don was too excited to let the family slur intrude on the moment. He placed his hand on Mitch Taylor’s shoulder, but—SNAP!—a flash from Niki’s camera temporarily blinded him. “Mitch,” he said to Taylor, blinking away the starburst, “at 28 we ain’t even half of Diaz’s 62, but one thing’s for sure: our number’s going up, and hers is coming down.” Don Thomas’s swaggering bravado seemed out of place for someone with such a pale face, bookish shoulders and a spine almost as bent as the question marks he always had on his mind.
“There’s so much blue sky in here, we need sunglasses,” Taylor smiled, posing for Niki Abbott’s lens. Or was it for Niki herself? Don Thomas wondered, sucking in a deep breath of frustration.
17
AFTER ONLY SIX days of Don Thomas’ revised election strategy playing out, Isabel was being pushed more and more onto the back foot. Karim Ahmed had suddenly vanished a second time. The entire nation’s media mounted a massive search for him but was coming up empty-handed. The timing was perfet and Don Thomas had Bobby Foster asking all the right questions on every nightly news bulletin: “He won on a technicality, but does an innocent man run? Does he hide? This man, Isabel Diaz’s star protégé, was claimed to have financed terrorists. Where is he now? Why won’t he come forward and explain himself?”
That Ahmed was not a public figure was beside the point. That the judge had let him go, likewise. Isabel’s support was nose-diving. That was the point. Down from its 70 percent to 55… already.
With seven weeks to Election Day, Isabel’s chances of victory looked like they’d be pole-axed unless she could arrest the slide. Publicly, she remained calm and restrained. Stoic.
But deep in private, behind tightly closed doors, things were different. This was a crisis of the highest order for her campaign, for the Party… for the nation.
And it was time for a group of well-placed individuals to act. To take their next steps. Planning, precision, surprise and deniability were crucial. As usual.
They’d been readying for something like this even before Jax Mason’s fall from the 14th floor of a London office building. It was time to use what they’d taken from him. The Diaz campaign was starting to reek with the stench of a slaughterhouse and they vowed, as such people do, to hose it clean. Isabel had to win; no matter what.
“It’s not just that we’d miss out on the White House,” Isis said, “though there is that. What stinks is that this pathetic duo, Foster and Taylor, might get to cup the future of this great nation in their mauling paws. If it wasn’t for Ahmed, damn him, we’d still be wiping the floor with them… It’s time to roll out Phase Two.”
Diana was in Georgia and had dialled into the meeting on a secure line. She liked her code-name. Goddess of the hunt carried a certain class, she decided, and that Diana was an emblem of chastity added a pinch of somewhat ironic spice.
18