Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

“Well, I’m sorry for your trouble, Massimo. But I don’t really see what you want me to do.”

“But, Geedeon, you started all of this!”

“I told you how remorseful I was. We are all sinners before the Lord.”

“Never mind! Now I am left to deal with the gorilla! While you run for president!”

“In a very good cause, may I remind you. And by the way, I do wish His Holiness had taken my advice. This absurd bull of yours is doing nobody any good at all. Well, Massimo, our dear Lord faced terrible obstacles in his journey. So we must all cope in our way and offer it up.”

There was a groan on the other end. “Geedeon. Ivan told me you are now the boyfriend of one of the girls. Is this true?”

“Well now, I think ‘boyfriend’ would be putting it rather…I have undertaken to minister to her. Poor little soul. She is young and very far from home.”

“Geedeon. Are you fucking this putana ?”

“What a thing to say, Massimo! And you an intimate of His Holiness! Shame on you, sir, shame! This conversation is over. Good day to you, sir!”

Gideon hung up and wiped his brow and patted his vest pocket, which once again bulged reassuringly with his gold watch, returned to him by his darling.

He considered. He must tell Olga not to discuss their relationship with others. He was planning to make “this putana ”-as Massimo had so coarsely put it-Mrs. Gideon Payne. But he preferred that announcement come in the newspaper, in the wedding pages-or news pages-and not bruited about from the lips of that truncheon-wielding Cossack Ivan or whatever his actual name was. Dear, dear…and now he must depart. He was speaking this very noon to the Greater Lower Mississippi Anti-Stem Cell Research Association. Then there was the creationist dinner in Pascagoula and after that the ribbon cutting of the new casino in Biloxi. My, my, my. What a busy whirl these presidential campaigns were. They left no time at all for prayer and reflection.

The man on the other end of the line identified himself simply as “Jerome.”

He sounded genuinely nervous. He also sounded genuinely smitten with Cass, and that made her nervous. He wanted to meet with her personally, and that made her especially nervous.

“I just want to shake your hand,” he said. “And give you these documents personally. I know that you’re in danger, Miss Devine. Believe me. But it would be such an honor. I don’t lead a very interesting life, you know. Do you know what I did yesterday? I tabulated how much we have spent this quarter over last quarter on incontinence pads. I wouldn’t mind just a little excitement in my life.”

“I…” Cass hesitated. He sounded real, anyway. Who could have made that up?

“Please?” Jerome begged.

Cass said, “I’ll call you back at this number in three hours.”

“Oh, Miss Devine, it will be an honor. Such an honor.”

She called Terry, breaking security. She said simply, “Call me at the other number in half an hour,” and hung up. The “other number” was code for the next pay phone on their list.

“Jesus, Cass,” Terry said when he called. “Careful.”

She explained. He said, “I don’t know. Could be a trap.”

“I don’t see that we have a choice,” Cass said. “He’s not going to hand over the documents unless it’s face-to-face. He read me a few lines from them. They sound pretty authentic to me.”

“Maybe we should call Speck? He scares me, too, but this is sort of his kind of thing, isn’t it? Lurking in the shadows with a sniper rifle. The Clancy thing-”

“No, no, no. I don’t want to involve Randy in this.”

“He’d involve you, if it were him,” Terry snorted. “Guarantee it.”

“I need to think this through,” Cass said. “I’ll call you back.”

Cass walked down Bourbon Street, past obese tourists and drunks, past barkers, street performers, and prostitutes, wondering just how to proceed. Then, crossing Toulouse Street, she saw a man with a YALE T-shirt and suddenly knew what to do. Perhaps, after all, you didn’t need to attend to get the education.

“Mr. Cohane?”

“Yes?”

“This is Al Witchel.”

The name didn’t ring an immediate bell. But Witchel, whoever he was, had Frank’s ultraprivate cell number. “Who?”

“I work for Mr. Wheary.”

Wheary was head of security for Cohane Enterprises.

“Oh yes,” Frank said, annoyed by the lapse of protocol. Why was a subordinate of Wheary’s calling him? “What is it?”

“Can I call you back on a land line?”

“All right.”

Witchel called Frank right back.

“We were doing a routine computer scan of the Elderheaven corporate telephone calling patterns, just part of the normal procedure, due diligence on the confidentiality agreement. We detected an anomalous pattern. We pursued it. It would seem, sir, that there’s a leak.”

She reflected, looking about her, that it was an apt venue for this rendezvous. The thought hadn’t occurred to her until just now.

Cass had proposed to her curious whistleblower, Jerome, that they meet at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in West Potomac Park, south of the Mall in Washington. Not because FDR was the president who had created Social Security, the system with which Cass was at war, but because the design of the memorial, sprawling over seven and a half acres, allowed for multiple exits in the case of an ambush.

It was late afternoon. There was still daylight, which they needed. She had instructed Jerome to meet her by the statue of FDR in his wheelchair. When she and Terry did their preliminary reconnaissance, he had taken one look at the depiction of FDR, with opaque bronze eyeglasses, upturned hat, and sitting on his almost invisible wheelchair, and said, “He looks like that Irish writer, James Joyce, sitting on a toilet.”

Now she stood, waiting.

A voice said, “Miss Devine?”

Cass wheeled. She’d instructed Jerome not to call her that. But one look at him reassured her that it was, in fact, Jerome. He looked like a Jerome.

He was carrying an attachй, surprisingly sophisticated: leather, with straps; not something that looked as if it also contained a brown-bag lunch, milk carton, and banana.

“Gosh,” Jerome said nervously, looking around. “This feels like a movie or something.” He whispered, “Shouldn’t we move off to the side, out of sight?”

“No,” Cass said.

Twenty yards away, in another section of the memorial, but with telephoto-lens line of sight of Cass and Jerome, stood Terry and a Tucker technical employee, operating a tripod-mounted videocamera and parabolic microphone.

Jerome patted the attachй and said to Cass, “It’s all here.”

“And what are these documents, exactly?” Cass said.

Jerome seemed puzzled by the question. “What I told you over the phone.”

“Tell me again,” Cass said.

At that moment, a National Park Service ranger saw Terry and his cameraman. He approached, all business.

“Hey. Excuse me?”

“Hm?” Terry said.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like we’re doing?”

“You can’t film here.”

“Why not?”

“You need a permit.”

Jerome said to Cass, “The documents pertaining to the sale of the actuarial prediction software by the Cohane company to Elderheaven Corporation.”

“I see,” Cass said, nodding like some TV reporter doing an on-camera interview. “And what exactly does it do?”

Jerome seemed nonplussed. “Do? It, well, predicts with great accuracy how long someone is going to live. Elderheaven uses it to decide whom to admit to their nursing homes. This way, they can only admit people who aren’t going to live very long. But they still have to basically hand over their life savings in order to be admitted. And under the terms of the sale, ten percent of Elderheaven’s increased profits get kicked back to Cohane.”