“But you know.”
“I know what they’re looking into, okay. How could I not know? Morris is going out of his mind about it, thinking sooner or later it’s going to come out, that Goldsmith will implicate him.”
So she did know.
Howard had never been able to persuade Morris not to discuss political liabilities with his wife. He’d clearly told her how Barton Goldsmith, the CIA director, had involved Sawchuck in his plan to cut deals with a handful of terrorism suspects. Goldsmith argued he was doing it to protect the people of the United States, but it turned out the people of the United States didn’t quite see it that way after the New York Times did an exposé on how Goldsmith had leaned on various prosecutors and law enforcement agencies across the country to allow certain terror suspects to walk in return for information.
Like those two nut jobs who were about to set off a bomb in a Florida theme park when they were nabbed. The moment he was notified of the arrests, Goldsmith was leaning on Florida’s highest-ranking law enforcement officials to hold the two men until his people arrived. Goldsmith’s intelligence experts said something much bigger was coming, and those clowns in Florida agreed to tell everything they knew in return for a couple of air tickets back to Yemen. (The U.S. government even paid their airfare home, the Times noted, a fact that rankled almost as much as the prospect of the devastation they nearly caused.)
Goldsmith credited the deal with thwarting another underwear/shoe-type bomber before he boarded a Washington-bound plane in Paris. But the Times story could find no definitive link between the two events. It suggested Goldsmith was inflating the value of the intel he’d received from the two theme park terrorists to justify sending them home.
Goldsmith was pilloried. He resigned. Florida’s attorney general followed.
What the Times didn’t know was that Florida was not the first such incident.
A Saudi illegal with al Qaeda sympathies had tried to set off a Ford F-150 filled with explosives around the corner from the Guggenheim. He’d parked it in the middle of the night and set it to go off at nine in the morning. But a woman looking out her brownstone window wondered why he kept checking something in the truck’s cargo bed, and called the police. A tactical team arrived and disabled the device before the bagel carts had set up for business. The truck was traced to its owner, the man arrested. Goldsmith was in the loop from the beginning, scooped the suspect, found out he had a bunch of similar-minded friends he was willing to roll on, all in return for a trip home.
Goldsmith called Morris.
Morris balked at first. He’d prosecute the son of a bitch. Told Goldsmith he wasn’t interested in making deals with terrorists. Goldsmith said, “You know, terror suspects aren’t the only people we have a lot of background intel on, if you get my meaning.”
There wasn’t an ambitious politician alive who didn’t have secrets he hoped were buried forever. Morris Sawchuck could only have guessed what Goldsmith might have had on him. Knowledge, perhaps, of one or more dirty tricks Howard had performed on his behalf. Campaign donations that hadn’t gone through channels. Maybe even something about Bridget’s sexual history. Or even his own.
Sawchuck allowed himself to be overruled.
The bomber went home.
When the Times story broke, Howard and Morris waited for the other shoe to drop. The Times would keep digging and find out Morris had caved. They could see the headlines: “New York AG Allows Guggenheim Bomber to Skip Country.”
It would have finished him.
No one who let terrorists go free got to the governor’s mansion, let alone the White House. Morris would have been lucky to serve on the board of a community college after this got out.
It is all this, Howard fears, that Allison Fitch has heard Bridget talking about on the phone with Morris.
“Jesus Christ, Bridget, how stupid are you?” Howard shakes his head. “How stupid is Morris?”
“He never talked about anything specific. Everything was in general terms. Just that he’s worried. That he hopes all this will blow over soon.”
“That’s the thing, Bridget. We think it’s all going to blow over soon. There’s a very good chance this will all go away.” His voice is very low. “But not if you start blabbing about it on the phone, where some blackmailing lesbo bimbo can hear you.”
“Howard, really, she’s bluffing. She never heard anything. I’m sure of it.”
He turns, takes two steps away from her, turns and looks at her again. He approaches and says, “The blackmail thing—I could see us getting out from under that. But if this woman really heard something, she’s got information that trumps some girl-on-girl action. She’s got dynamite. You understand what I’m saying, Bridget? She has dynamite. She has a goddamn nuclear weapon.”