Flashpoint Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Titles by Ed Gorman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A Selection of Titles by Ed Gorman

  The Dev Conrad Series

  SLEEPING DOGS

  STRANGLEHOLD

  BLINDSIDE *

  FLASHPOINT *

  The Sam McCain Series

  THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

  WAKE UP LITTLE SUSIE

  WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW?

  SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR ME

  EVERYBODY’S SOMEBODY’S FOOL

  BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

  FOOLS RUSH IN

  TICKET TO RIDE

  BAD MOON RISING

  * available from Severn House

  FLASHPOINT

  Ed Gorman

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Ed Gorman.

  The right of Ed Gorman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gorman, Edward.

  Flashpoint. – (A Dev Conrad political thriller ; 4)

  1. Conrad, Dev (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Political consultants–United States–Fiction.

  3. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.5'4-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8300-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-424-9 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To the Charter Members of the Lunchtime Hall of Fame

  Deb and Dale Jones

  Melissa Sodeman and Ricky Sprague

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Multiple Myeloma Foundation whose support keeps all of us with this incurable cancer alive as long as possible. I would also like to thank my longtime partner in crime (and first editor) Linda Siebels for her contributions and friendship.

  PART ONE

  At any other time this trip to Northern Illinois would be a pleasant break from the chaos of my office in Chicago. Dev Conrad and Associates is involved with five different candidates in this election cycle and now, in mid-October, each campaign is only three weeks from the finish. And in this election cycle nothing can be taken for granted.

  So leaving my office for the day, jumping into my Jeep for a fast drive upstate, for an even faster drive through heavily forested land that showed the gleaming golds and burnished browns and elegant reds of autumn, should be an enviable twenty-four-hour vacation.

  But I am still hearing Senator Robert Logan say: ‘We both know this phone may be bugged, Dev. You know where my cabin is. I need you up here now.’ And after that he hangs up.

  Neither the sweet, piney breeze nor the sight of a mother deer helping her awkward fawn across the asphalt road can quell my sense of dread. Logan spent two terms in the House and is now running for his second term as a senator. He is a professional politician. He is one of those inherited-wealth men who votes generally to help those less fortunate.

  He has the rangy looks of a small-town Midwesterner; the way he talks and walks and handles himself suggests a quiet self-confidence that is offset by his easy self-deprecating humor. He can afford this humility because he’s both handsome and bright. Third in his law school class at Princeton. He worked for eleven years in Chicago as a defense attorney, a soldier for the machine we have. He enjoys the brawl and the bravado of big-time elected office. Face it. There are few clubs more privileged than the United States Senate. People of every race, color and creed stand in line to kiss your star-spangled ass.

  So what the hell is going on? He’s at his cabin and he’s obviously in some kind of desperate trouble. I start to think of all the possibilities, then I force myself to stop. Borrowing trouble, as my father said – he was a political consultant too, a very successful one – is a waste of time because your clients will just bring it to you free of charge.

  Suddenly, through a sparse line of jack pines, I see the sparkling lake. I’ve spent a few weekends up here with the senator and his staffers. We fished and hiked the hills then settled in for a night of eating and drinking and working on the campaign. The lake lent everything we did a rich blue backdrop. And it was just as beautiful at night; I’d sit on the dock with a couple cans of beer and watch the stars as their lights were vaguely detailed in the water. My ex-wife still says that my years as an investigator for army intelligence made it impossible for me to relax, that as soon as we finished making love my mind went back to churning through the case I was working on. I always wished that she could have been with me on this big-ass dock at midnight.

  I needed GPS because I hadn’t been here in some time and I had to reach my destination as quickly as I could. To the east was a deep forest. I recognized an ancient rusted CAMEL CIGARETTES sign on a field gate from my trips here. Turning right would take me down a twisting road that would switch back on itself and end a few hundred yards from the cabin.

  I speed up now.

  When the road ends you turn and drive on sandy soil to reach the back of a large A-frame house that by agreement everybody calls a cabin. It was big enough for a family of five and stocked with all the furnishings appropriate for life in the suburbs. ‘I’ll leave the roughing-it to Teddy Roosevelt,’ the senator once joked to a reporter.

  I pull the Jeep up next to the cabin. As I get out I can smell the lake; fresh and chill. No sound from inside, no TV or music. Robert is a big fan of eighties music. I think he still wants to be Simon Le Bon when he grows up.

  Then I hear the front door of the place opening, followed by footsteps on the roofed porch that spans the width of the house. ‘Dev?’

  Even before I get around the corner and see him I can tell from t
he timbre of his usually deep voice that he is even more tense than he was on the phone. He speaks now a full octave higher.

  Blue chambray work shirt, Levi’s, dark hair mussed and brown eyes those of a man barely in control of himself.

  ‘What the hell took you so long?’ he snapped.

  ‘I couldn’t get my jet pack to work so I had to take a regular plane.’

  I think his smile surprised him as much as it did me. He shook his head then ran big, wide hands through his mess of hair. A splash of dark red caught my eye on the left sleeve of his shirt. ‘I don’t sound too crazy, do I?’ Then, ‘Thanks for coming, Dev. This …’ He waved his hand. And stopped talking.

  I walk up on the porch as he just stands there staring out at the lake. A red speedboat is bouncing roaring sounds off the high cliffs on the far side of the water. Since he isn’t paying any attention to me I pause at the framed window next to the door and look in. Hardwood floors, an enormous fireplace, leather couches and chairs, a plasma TV screen that even an upscale sports bar would envy and a kitchen a Gold Coast chef gave him tips about building and stocking.

  Out of sight are the two Murphy-like beds that can be pulled down near the back of the place. This is not to mention the shower downstairs and the two bedrooms upstairs. Oh, and the additional shower as well.

  Something like a sob catches in his throat. His back is to me and now I see how stooped his shoulders are. I see again the inch-long trail of red darkness on his sleeve. My stomach clenches automatically. A few of my cases as an army intelligence investigator involved violence. What the hell is going on here?

  ‘Robert.’ Still not turning around.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You need to talk to me.’

  ‘Somebody set me up, Dev.’

  His remark is close to the one uttered by the infamous Washington, DC, politician Marion Barry when one of his many mistresses cooperated with the feds in busting him for drugs.

  But I know that Robert isn’t thinking about any such ironies now. He is lost in panic and helplessness. In some respects he has ceased to function.

  ‘I can’t help you unless you tell me what happened.’

  His head hangs even lower. He won’t be looking out at the lake now. If his eyes are open he’ll be staring at the ground. ‘The back porch.’ Even speaking these three words seems to exhaust him. The head drops lower.

  There is nothing to say. I can’t clap him manfully on the shoulder and say, ‘It’ll be all right, Senator, just let me handle it.’ That’s what they all want to hear, that’s what they all think they’re paying you for. Sometimes you can help them. The help may not be quite legal or even honorable, but as any operative will tell you that is the game and if you are unwilling to play the game then you’re quickly dealt out. In our silence birds cry out and somewhere in the forest I can hear a dog bark.

  He turns and looks at me as I put my hand on the doorknob and push the door inward. Our eyes study each other. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. In his gaze there’s just frenzy.

  My first impression is of some kind of overly sweet odor. Some kind of air freshener spritzed to a toxic level. All the windows are open, too. It’s actually cold in here. Autumn cold; even a hint of winter. The odor and the open windows means he’s trying to cover a smell. Given his crazed alarm, given the streak of blood on his shirt I saw, given his remark that somebody set him up, I know now what I’ll find on the back porch.

  My stomach clenches again and despite the cold I know there’s light sweat on my face.

  Oh, yes, sometimes you can walk on the dark side and keep your candidate from self-destructing. That is, if what you’re covering up falls within certain parameters.

  I have the feeling that I’m about to see a dead woman. I also have the feeling – knowing now that he has probably been lying to me all along – that I know who she is.

  Or was.

  ONE

  Fifteen days earlier I’d sat on a folding chair in a high school gymnasium watching Senator Logan conduct a town hall meeting. Given the state of the economy, mixed-to-racist feelings about the president of the United States and the leader of Logan’s party and the prospect of unions being busted, not to mention gay marriage, there was plenty to discuss.

  The gym was decorated with yellow and black crepe paper and large papier-mâché images of a lion’s head. Apparently there had been a pep rally here earlier today. Hard not to think of your own pep rallies, the slap of basketballs on the shining floor, the feel in your arms of your first love knowing that all too soon she’d break your heart; and how small it would all seem when you visited it a few years later.

  Logan was in his usual casual attire, the chambray shirt and jeans plus a gray tweed jacket. He addressed the crowd of perhaps a hundred through a stand-up microphone. The meeting had started promptly at seven and now, at eight, showed no signs of calming down.

  Even though some of the questions were pointed, none had been personal or demeaning. The entire country was pissed off and generally with good reason. The citizens of Linton, Illinois, population 31,600, had every right to be just as pissed, especially given the fact that within the past two years three of its manufacturing plants had been relocated in the South.

  But then came the inevitable.

  If this was a movie role you’d cast somebody burly and menacing. He’d have wiry black hair and need a shave and maybe his teeth would be bad. His eyes and his voice would belong on the violent wing of the nearest psych ward.

  You would not cast a maybe one-hundred-and-thirty-pound, fortyish man with thick glasses and a faint lisp as your choice to drop the birther bomb. He wore a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck and tan pants that reached to his ribcage. He was a parody of a type and when he stood up my first response was to feel sorry for him. You could imagine the bullying he’d had to endure in school and the invisible sort of life he’d had as an adult.

  But then he started waving a bunch of papers and that was never a good sign. People who wave papers announce upfront that they are going to say something crazy. George Bush was behind 9/11 had become a popular myth once again. A lot of papers had been waved at Robert about that.

  ‘Senator Logan, my name is Stan Candiss and I have proof here that your president is a Communist spy.’

  Before Mr Candiss had grabbed my attention the gymnasium had been inspiring some high school memories of my own. I’d been thinking about the girls I’d taken to my junior and senior proms respectively, wondering what they were doing now, wondering if they ever wondered about me. But when Mr Candiss had stood up I’d sensed – despite my feeling a little sorry for him – that we were about to witness the inevitable moment in all town hall meetings: the conspiracy accusation.

  Mr Candiss was apparently a known commodity locally.

  ‘God damn it, Stan; sit down and shut up.’

  ‘We’re trying to have a serious discussion here, Stan.’

  ‘Somebody should throw him out.’

  Mr Candiss, it would seem, was not a beloved figure. Which did not stop him from continuing to wave his papers from his position in the last row of folding chairs – or from saying, ‘Whether or not the senator wants to hear about it, there is a website that proves that after the president was born in Kenya he lived for eight years in Moscow. If any of you have ever seen The Manchurian Candidate, you know how communists can turn human beings into assassins. This website documents how the president – our president – is going to turn our entire arsenal of nuclear bombs on our own country.’

  Though there were a few giggles, the general response was cursing, grumbling and even threatening.

  Logan handled it calmly. ‘I’ve actually seen that website. I believe you called my office in Washington a while back, Mr Candiss. You actually made our receptionist so curious that after she hung up she went right to the site and then started showing it to the staff. We were very intrigued.’

  This time there was laughter. It wasn’t hard to imagine co
ngressional staffers chortling over some whacked-out crap about the president nuking America.

  ‘These people laugh because they’re ignorant. Are you ignorant, too, Senator Logan?’

  Candiss went back to waving his papers but was forced to stop when a huge man in a Packers sweatshirt and jeans reared up from his seat and stalked to the last row of folding chairs. Most of the people had swiveled around to watch the action.

  You can never tell how something like this will play out. Harsh words can lead to violence. There is always the chance, given the fact that the NRA wants to arm everybody over the age of three, that a gun might appear.

  ‘We need to stay calm,’ Logan said. ‘Sir, if you’ll take your seat again—’

  Logan’s local people had hired two off-duty police officers to handle security. They now appeared from their posts at the respective doors of the gym. They moved quickly toward Mr Candiss. They would stand next to him in case the big man tried to charge him. Then came the surprise.

  ‘Stan, I stick up for you all the time at the lumberyard,’ the man said, and there was real sympathy in his tone, ‘and I even listen to all your stupid stories at lunchtime. But we’re trying to have a serious talk here so please just sit the hell down and shut the hell up.’

  Just about everybody in the gym applauded. Mr Candiss knew enough to look embarrassed and sit down. As the Packers man made his way back to his seat other men stuck their hands out to shake his. I admired the way he’d handled the situation. I’d have shaken his hand, too.

  Logan had a few awkward moments but finally assured everybody that he was still interested in taking questions. His enthusiasm for the task only reminded me and his staffers of how our fortunes had changed in the last twenty-three days. The other side had dumped more than eleven million dollars in negative TV advertising into the state and we had started to feel its effects. For the previous two months we had managed to stay two-to-three points ahead, but now our internal polling showed that we were in a tie. Our opponent was a man named Charlie Shay, a folksy multimillionaire insurance executive who had once been considered too conservative for even this election cycle. Insurance people were not beloved in this country. But his bullshit Huckleberry Finn persona, created by a public relations team in Washington, was starting to take hold. There was one especially unctuous commercial where he was sitting with his grandson at sunset along a stream where he pretends to be fishing while handing out numerous lies about Logan. The closest Shay had ever gotten to fishing was opening a can of tuna.