Mike Maden - River of Gods

The expectation tingled the length of his arm all the way down to his index finger. Any moment now.

And then a woman stepped into view.

Margaret Myers.

The former president stood in front of Fiero, completely blocking his shot. The hand-loaded .300 Winchester Magnum round was powerful enough to tear through Myers’s skull and plow into Fiero’s. But that wasn’t an option.

He and Myers hadn’t spoken in over a month, but she had communicated her opposition to his killing spree through Ian. Myers knew Fiero was on his list. You can’t just go around murdering politicians you don’t like. The rule of law protects all of us. If you shoot Fiero, who’ll shoot me?

He ignored her. Johnny, Early, Mossa, Balla, Moctar, Mano. The rule of law didn’t do them any good. Why should a lawbreaker like Fiero benefit from the law?

Damn it.

He withdrew his fingertip from the trigger completely, glanced away from the scope. He nearly vomited. Myers had escaped death by the slimmest possible margin. One more heartbeat and she could have been Jackson Pollocked all over Fiero’s stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator.

“Ian,” he whispered in his mic.

“She made me do it,” Ian replied.

“Who made you do what?”

“Don’t blame him,” Myers said. Her voice was in his earpiece.

Pearce put his eye to his scope again. She wasn’t in the kitchen. He moved the scope around, window to window. Found her in the second-story bathroom glancing out of the window, searching, but not in his direction. He watched her lips move. Her voice arrived a split second later, the briefest of time delays.

“I can’t see you out there, Troy, but I know you can hear me.”

“How?”

“Sorry, old man. But I owed her one,” Ian said. Clearly, he had told Myers what Pearce planned to do that night.

“You’re fired,” Pearce said.

“You’re hired, Ian,” Myers countered. “And I’ll double your salary.”

“You think this will stop me?”

“No, Troy, I don’t. But I’ve notified the Secret Service that there might be a problem. They’ll be on you as soon as I give the order.”

“Give it.”

“I’d rather not.”

“What do you want?”

“A word.”

“Shoot.”

“Nice punning, former employer.”

“Shut up, Ian.”

“I understand you want justice, Troy. I can give it to you. But not at the end of a gun.”

“I’m listening, but I’m also aiming.” Fiero had wandered back into his scope. She stood in the living room now, laughing too hard at something Alec Baldwin was saying.

“A bullet through the brain would be far too painless of a death, and far too quick, for someone as loathsome as Barbara Fiero,” Myers said.

“I like the way this is sounding.”

“I have a better way to make her suffer. She’ll be tormented every waking breath.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Stand down. Do nothing. I’ll take care of it,” Myers said. “You have to trust me on this.”

Silence.

“Troy?”

“Trust issues, remember?”

“If I’m not telling the truth, you can always kill her later, right?”

More silence.

“How soon?”

“It begins tomorrow.”

“How will I know you’ve done it?”

“You won’t be able to miss it, I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to it. Otherwise, Fiero’s dead. Diele, too.”

“There’s a bigger picture here, Troy. And killing those two dirt bags will only ruin it.”

“If you start lecturing me about political compromise, I’ll start shooting.”

“We’re beyond compromise. But violence isn’t the answer, either. You’ll only be helping them in the long run.”

Myers explained her plan, filled in the big picture.

Pearce was stunned. He wanted bloody revenge, but she was right.

Her plan was better.

Pearce didn’t pull the trigger on Fiero, but Myers did. Pulled it on Diele, too. She released Bath’s secret audio of them plotting the illegal drone strike against Mossa and Pearce, which would have resulted in Pearce’s death, an innocent American citizen and a war hero.

The story first leaked on Fox News, a network Fiero had targeted for punishment over the years. Payback was a real bitch. So was Fiero. Fox News was happy to toss her into the wood chipper of public opinion.

Bath had recorded virtually everything Fiero had ever done as a form of protection against her wily employer. It was also a form of leverage. Fiero was one of the most powerful politicians on the Hill. If any law-enforcement agency ever decided to take Bath on, she knew Fiero would be forced to protect her in order to protect herself.

What Bath hadn’t counted on was Ian McTavish, the hacking genius that penetrated her defenses and stole everything she had before she destroyed it. Of course, what Bath possessed wasn’t limited to Fiero. CIOS held the entire Hill hostage, whether they knew it or not. Bath had hacked everybody, never realizing that Ian had hacked her. Now Myers and Ian had all of Bath’s data at their disposal.

The first recording they released was Fiero’s conversation with Diele, suggesting an illegal drone strike on Mossa and Pearce. To any political insider, there was hardly anything startling about the audio. It was a typical closed-door conversation, cold-blooded and calculating—standard Washington fare. But the Fox News morning anchors ate it up. So did the public. It was House of Cards for real. By noon, the talk-radio personalities were running with the scandal. By the end of the day, most evening news shows—local, national, broadcast, cable—led with it.

Harry Fowler, Fiero’s campaign manager, was in damage-control mode the minute the story first broke that morning, calmly placing a few phone calls to network presidents on his speed dial to quell things down and keep the contagion from spreading. It didn’t work.

The Fiero scandal had serious legs, and the dying broadcast networks couldn’t afford to be left holding Fiero’s bag. Audience share was everything. Like the Great Powers in World War I, the networks and cable news outlets were willing to shed buckets of blood for a scant few percentage points of gain. By the end of the day, Fowler and his team were in full panic mode, leaping into raging news infernos everywhere on the horizon, smoke jumping without parachutes. And that was just the first day.

Now that Fiero and Diele were a major news item, the networks were hungry for more revelations. Ian chummed the waters carefully, ladling out the juicy chunks in digestible, quotable bites, not only to the media but to party organizations as well. Why not turn the sharks on each other?

The Sunday-morning talk shows were crammed with Republican and Democratic legislators jockeying for position, trying to seize the moral high ground from their opponents, each concentrating their verbal volleys on either Fiero or Diele according to party affiliation. Neither had any true defenders. The best either party could hope for was that the other party would get the most blame.

But the public was outraged at both parties. Even the venerable Howard Finch, an old ally of Fiero and a lifelong Democrat, gave an impassioned plea at the end of his show, Meet the Nation , urging Fiero to reconsider her decision to seek the presidential nomination.

Fiero’s election hopes evaporated, and Diele’s future was suddenly questioned. Greyhill pushed him off of the ticket, fearing the vice president’s scandals would ruin his own reelection chances, hoping to hide behind the paper-thin shield of plausible deniability.