the Second Horseman (2006) Read online

  "The difference with that relationship was that she got pregnant. She was young. Nineteen at the time," he said, continuing to push his food around his plate. "From what Dad said, she mostly stuck around for a couple years, but then started doing some trips. And they got longer as time went on. She wasn't the type for a house and a family and a dog, you know?"

  "So your father raised you."

  "Mostly, yeah. Mom'd show up a couple times a year for a few weeks. Then, one summer when I was ... I don't know. Eight? She asked me to go to Europe with her. I couldn't believe it."

  "I'm surprised your father would allow it."

  He smiled and shook his head. "See? You still don't understand. No one could say no to her about anything. She'd left, but Dad still loved her. I don't know which of us was more excited when she showed up on our doorstep -- him or me. That's why he never divorced her. Never got remarried."

  "We have records of her traveling and you traveling with her, but there's no real record of her having a job. And no record of your father ever giving her a significant amount of money."

  "No."

  "So she was some kind of criminal. A con artist."

  Brandon took a deep breath and let it out. There was a time when those would have been fighting words, but he was older and had mellowed on the subject.

  "Not really. I mean, she sort of transcended that label. People wanted to be near her. And they gave her things. Money, places to live, plane tickets, food, clothes. Whatever. But they benefited just as much. And when she left -- like she eventually always did -- they were really sad. Sometimes even devastated. But I don't think they would have given up that time or wanted the things they'd given her back."

  "Strange life, though. For a kid your age, I mean."

  Brandon shrugged. "I saw the world and had experiences that were pretty unique. And in the end, I wasn't any different than anyone else. I wanted to be with her. As much as it hurt when she was finally gone, I wouldn't give up the time I spent with her."

  "But you don't know what happened to her."

  "No. Dad hired a guy who traced her as far as Russia, but the trail went cold there."

  "Did you ever try to find her?"

  He shook his head.

  "Why not? I would think you'd have contacts that would be pretty useful."

  "She's dead. What is it they say about the bulb burning the brightest burning the shortest? She wasn't meant to get old."

  "But --"

  "Can we change the subject?"

  "Sure. Sorry. Why don't we go back to the original question? Why did you become a criminal? If it wasn't really your mother's influence, and it certainly wasn't your father's . . ."

  The sun had gone down and he couldn't help looking over the back fence as the trees lost their color. He could jump over it and run. But then what?

  "Who says I'm a criminal? I'll have you know I was wrongfully --"

  She held up her hands, silencing him. "Hypothetically."

  He started tapping his fork on the table, listening to the dull clack of it fill the air. Was this a setup? Were they trying to get him to admit something? What would be the point? He'd never done anything all that bad, and they'd already put him in prison.

  "Funny story," he said, finally. "When I was in school, I actually considered going to work for the FBI. Hard to picture, isn't it? Me as an FBI agent?"

  "Oh,1 don't know," Catherine said. "Why didn't you?"

  "Police work isn't like what you see on TV. Ninety-nine percent of it is complete boredom and you never really accomplish anything. Bust one drug dealer or terrorist and there are five to take his place. Then you have the bureaucracy to deal with. Imagine your life being ruled by some fat bureaucrat lifer who spends all his time pissing in corners." He shuddered dramatically. "Crime, though . . . Now that's a good time. Seventy percent fascinating intellectual exercise and thirty percent full-on rush. Leaving zero percent for dealing with some asshole in a toupee who's planning on giving you a shitty annual review because you made him look bad in a meeting."

  Catherine nodded with what he'd swear was real understanding.

  "Deep down, everybody wants to be a criminal, Catherine. You know that. It's why everyone's seen The Godfather ten times. Hey, did I hear you say something about dessert?"

  The refrigerator was visible from the deck through the glass door, so Catherine retreated to the pantry and stepped inside. She wanted nothing more than to close the door and stand there in the dark, but wouldn't let herself do it. Not that it mattered. Brandon Vale was probably already over the fence and headed for Mexico by now. In fact, she hoped he was. Almost.

  A few deep breaths and she felt slightly calmer. It was hard for her to imagine what Brandon's mother must have been like -- that anyone could have burned any more brightly than he did. Actually, he looked just like the passport photo of her that Catherine had spent an inexplicable amount of time staring at. Even long dead, Aisha Vale still glowed.

  Of course, Brandon wasn't as startlingly gorgeous as his mother -- on a scale of one to ten, probably an eight compared to her twelve. But he had the same wide-eyed, almost childlike expression, the same open smile that made you feel like you were the only person to ever see it. And beneath it all, the same subversive undercurrent that made you completely uncertain as to what he was going to do next. What the hell had she gotten herself into?

  She tugged up on the low waistband of her jeans and down on her shirt, cursing herself for letting Richard talk her into wearing them and then walked smoothly from the pantry to retrieve a carton of ice cream from the freezer. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her guest balancing his chair on its two back legs and examining a blooming rosebush intertwined with the fence. A surge of adrenaline went through her at the realization that he was still there, but she wasn't sure why. Excitement? Fear?

  He was a professional criminal, she reminded herself. While the stress of all this was killing her slowly, it was probably just another day at the office for him.

  There were only a few bites left in the carton when Brandon leaned back in his chair and ran a hand over his distended stomach. Catherine had given up fifteen minutes before, content to just watch.

  "So why did you, Catherine?"

  "Why did I what?"

  "Become a criminal."

  She felt what little calm she'd put together in the pantry abandon her and he leaned forward to study what was obviously an unexpected reaction to his question. She managed to regain her composure quickly enough that most people would have never even noticed the lapse. Unfortunately, he wasn't most people.

  "I don't know. I guess I felt like there wasn't any other choice."

  Chapter EIGHT

  Edwin Hamdi sat motionless in front of the empty desk -- once used by John Kennedy -- and waited. He'd spent a fair amount of time in that particular chair, staring through the increasingly thick glass at Washington and trying to find a comfortable position. As near as he could tell, there was none.

  When he'd published his first book on Middle Eastern politics and culture, he'd expected it to sell a couple of thousand copies that would clutter the shelves of university libraries all across the country, dusty and unread. It was a bit of a shock when the word of mouth started. While it would be an exaggeration to say the books flew off the shelves, they definitely began to move. Not in numbers that would impress a romance novelist or celebrity biographer, but not bad for a young college professor.

  This, of course, had led to a few tentative invitations to various news programs, though it seemed that most producers were less concerned with expertise than the danger of professorial lecturing turning off their audience. Their fears turned out to be unfounded. Hamdi's unusual ability to explain the Arab mind to Americans, combined with the passion and logic he brought to disassembling the conventional wisdom, had left more than one television opponent shouting for him to "just shut up!" Suddenly, he was a talk show favorite.

  His popularity and the near unfail
ing accuracy of his predictions had eventually made him known beyond the circles of producers looking to keep their viewers from channel surfing when they were occasionally forced to watch something more complicated than the latest celebrity divorce. Politicians had started to call, asking opinions and advice, and eventually that had led to a minor position as a national security consultant to the prior administration.

  Unfortunately, that post turned out to be more of a publicity stunt than anything else. The president had been set on continuing the destructive eye-for-an-eye strategy that had become so popular with his constituents. In his mind, the tangible act of catching and punishing a terrorist was easier to explain in a sound bite than the admittedly complex business of preventing the genesis of that terrorist in the first place.

  Hamdi had been quickly and quietly fired for speaking inconvenient truths -- a fact that had been picked up in a small way by the media when a number of his more grim predictions had, inevitably, come true. And that would have been the end of his career in government if it hadn't been an election year.

  He'd been toying with the idea of another book in his new office at the University of Virginia when the call had come. Not from an advisor or a consultant, but from the challenger personally. A few days later, Hamdi was working as a well-publicized national security advisor to the man soon to become the leader of the free world.

  "What now, Edwin?" President James Morris said, entering and slamming the door behind him.

  "A full theater was destroyed in Jerusalem."

  Morris fell into his chair. "How many dead?"

  "We're not sure at this point. Over a hundred, I would guess. More than that injured."

  Morris jerked forward in his seat and slapped a hand down on his desk. "The entire world works its ass off to get things moving in the Palestinians' direction, the Israelis finally give back Gaza, and what happens? The whole thing collapses into a goddamn civil war. And terrorism? It increases! Those people in Gaza are worse off now than when the Israelis were in control."

  Hamdi remained silent, aware that any questions arising from the president's occasional outbursts were entirely rhetorical. These mini tantrums, while endlessly terrifying to most staffers, never really came to much. In fact, Hamdi saw them as evidence that, while certainly a skillful politician with the requisite survival instincts, James Morris actually cared. An unusual trait in Washington.

  The president jerked his chair around and stared out the window for a few seconds, then spun back to face Hamdi. "Go ahead, Edwin. Say it."

  "Sir?"

  "Say I told you so."

  "I don't see how --"

  "I'm serious. You know you want to. Say it."

  Hamdi folded his hands uncomfortably in his lap but managed not to start wringing them. "I told you so, sir. But I'm not sure what you could have done with the information. Were you going to say that you opposed self-rule by the Palestinians because they couldn't be trusted to run their own affairs? That you believed the Israelis would do whatever they could behind the scenes to sabotage Gaza's future? You'd have made enemies of everyone involved."

  Morris's expression hovered between a smile and a smirk. "Very nice, Edwin. Very smooth. I'll make a politician out of you yet."

  Hamdi didn't respond. When he'd gone to work for this administration, he'd quickly learned to quash the measurably correct, but overly forceful outbursts that had made him so successful on television. This was not the time to make a mistake that could cause him to lose the power and access his position afforded him. Not when he and Richard Scanlon were on the brink of solving a problem that the world believed irresolvable.

  "There's more, isn't there?" Morris said.

  "Yes, sir."

  "What?"

  "We have it on good authority that Israel is going to reoccupy Gaza."

  "How good?"

  "Consider it a fait accompli. We're already seeing troop movements."

  "I swear to God, if there's ever a World War III, these assholes are going to start it."

  "I can't argue with that analysis, sir."

  "Nothing we can do to stop them?"

  Hamdi shook his head. "It was their plan all along. Show the world that giving in to any Palestinian demand would just increase misery on both sides3 then move back in."

  "In your opinion."

  "Excuse me, sir?"

  "Do you have proof of that? That it was their plan all along?"

  "No, sir," Hamdi admitted. "But --"

  "Then it's just your opinion. And one I don't want to ever hear repeated."

  Hamdi admonished himself silently for making the statement -- no matter how accurate he felt it was. While it was well known that Israel was one of the foundations of Middle East instability and aggression toward the West, he had to be very careful in the way he presented those arguments. The Jews and their American lobby already hated him and missed no opportunity to undermine him. Any verbal misstep would be lauded as final proof of his anti-Semitism -- a label that they had turned into an unfailingly deadly weapon.

  "Yes, sir. I understand."

  "So, how do we react?"

  Hamdi remained silent.

  "Come on, Professor. I'm asking you to lecture me on the Middle East. It's your favorite thing to do in the world."

  "After the mall explosion, it seems politically impossible to come down on the side of the Arabs," Hamdi said.

  "You let me worry about the politics, Edwin."

  Hamdi crossed his legs and leaned farther back in the chair, mentally reviewing what he was about to say and making sure that his voice remained quietly respectful.

  "Did you know that apartheid was originally a good idea, sir?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "It's entirely true. The original concept was that South Africa would be split evenly and equitably amongst the tribes. The thinking was that they had never been able to get along and never would be able to get along. An astute observation, in some ways. Perhaps not so astute in others."

  "But separation isn't working, or Gaza wouldn't be in the situation it's in today."

  Hamdi nodded. "Partial separation isn't working. As with many half solutions, this one is causing more problems than it's solving. Israel is still heavily involved and their security caveats are so onerous that Gaza can't be considered truly sovereign."

  "So you're saying split the country in half with a tall, thick wall and put the Arabs on one side and the Jews on the o^ier."

  "It would be a step in the right direction. Though, honestly, it wouldn't result in peace. Both groups want all of the land. I think you'll find that in the long term neither group will give up its rights to a single square foot of land that they believe was given to them by God."

  "It sounds like you're telling me it's hopeless," Morris said. "Is that what you're telling me?"

  "I didn't --"

  Morris stood, supporting himself with fists pressed into Kennedy's blotter. "I've listened to you, Edwin. I've listened to every word you've said. If I show any more goddamn respect for Islam, I'm going to have to grow a beard. I've started the process of normalizing our relationship with Iran. We've spent tens of millions of perfectly good dollars hiring Arab PR firms to polish up our image across the Middle East. I've criticized the Israelis for reckless attacks against civilians. Not just remained silent, mind you. Actively criticized them. And worst of all, I put a political gun to my head and told the American people that if we're going to reduce our reliance on Middle Eastern oil, they're going to have to sacrifice. Do you know how much the American people like to sacrifice? Not a whole hell of a lot."

  Hamdi opened his mouth to speak, but Morris cut him off again. "You know where all this is getting me? Nowhere!"

  "You haven't created new terrorists, sir. And that's a vast improvement over the policies of the last admin--"

  "You know what? I can't show a voter a terrorist I didn't create. But the Republicans can damn well show them what's left of the Mall of America."

  "
I know, sir. And I wish I had something more constructive to tell you. The truth is, you'll never eradicate terrorism. There will always be someone out there with a radical ideal and the knowledge of how to build a bomb. But you can do a great deal to minimize organized terrorism. We've seen it happen in the IRA, in Corsica, in the Basque country. People's lives improved and these terrorist groups simply lost their relevance. They became a solution to a problem that no longer exists."

  "The Middle East isn't Europe."

  "No, but I'm convinced that the same general principles apply. You only have to look at Israel to see where draconian enforcement measures take you. What has their brutality and racism gotten them? A country that's slowly sliding into chaos. We don't want to follow the Israelis into failure. We want to follow the Europeans into success. Unfortunately, though, those kinds of changes don't happen overnight."

  "Pushing for economic and political reform in the Middle East isn't going to do anything about the question of Israel," Morris said. "We're talking about a group of people who just want one crappy piece of land that most Americans wouldn't pay two cents for. And the goddamn Arabs can run the rest of it right into the oil-soaked ground."

  "Unfortunately, whether they're right or wrong, the Palestinians consider it their crappy piece of land, sir." Hamdi said. "The sad reality is that we're trapped. We can make every effort to be evenhanded in disputes between the Jews and Arabs, but we can't go so far as to make enemies of the Israelis. They're far more dangerous than the Arabs will ever be. In the past, they've proven their willingness to spy on and attack us if they feel it's in their best interest. They are, very simply, much more effective terrorists than the Arabs. If we ever began to support Arab causes to a degree that worried them -- if we ever tried to force their hand -- I can personally guarantee you that they would attack America in the most brutal way possible and leave a trail back to the Palestinians."

  "You're full of strong opinions today, aren't you, Edwin."

  Hamdi knew he should remain silent on this particular point, but he couldn't. "That's not an opinion, sir. It's a very dangerous fact."