The Candidate Read online

  The Candidate

  Paul Harris

  Copyright © 2012 by Paul Harris

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  www.ereads.com

  As always, for Moira

  “Some rise by sin,

  And some, by virtue, fall.”

  Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare

  PROLOGUE

  MOUNT PLEASANT, IOWA, 5 WEEKS BEFORE THE IOWA CAUCUSES

  IT HAD BEEN twenty years since she last loaded a gun with the intention of killing a man. Now she stared at the rifle lying in front of her in the half-light and was afraid she had forgotten how to use it. The weapon’s lines and curves appeared unfamiliar and alien. With hesitation, she reached out a hand to befriend this strange creature and forced herself to touch it. It felt cold, hard and heavy in her hands. A feeling of relief coursed through her. She closed her eyes and held the weapon close, cradling it like a child. Her lost child. She sighed softly.

  She remembered.

  The muscle memory locked inside her flesh for two decades forgot nothing. Only her mind had been distracted by her recent second life; an existence that now evaporated away in the face of this old sensation. Her fingers, alive with sudden electricity, grasped the solid, dull metal of the barrel. She made herself calm, breathing softly to find the quiet, still, inner place that would allow her to complete her task. A single bead of sweat traced a path down her forehead. She pressed her face against the barrel and wrestled her feelings under control.

  For a long minute she crouched there, high in the dark rafters of the school gymnasium, hugging the rifle to her breast. Soon her pulse calmed and her mind became focused and alert, aware only of the physical sensations around her, numb to doubt or conscience. She thought only of why she was here and her task ahead.

  It was before dawn when the woman broke into the school and climbed up into a gantry hidden in the maze of beams and rafters of the sports hall. Now she had been lurking up in the dark of the roof like some ghostly spirit for almost eighteen hours. She had lain there, watching cleaners come and go, until finally volunteers arrived to set up the chairs for the meeting. She expected security too, but instead she just saw a couple of policemen glance around idly and then sit themselves in a corner, hands tucked into gun belts over which middle-aged paunches spread. Then the crowd trickled in, people murmuring softly to their friends or gathering in small groups to chat and catch up on gossip. She sat above them, not listening to the words drift up to her in a language she had once gleefully learned but now sounded grating and alien to her ears.

  She expected to feel something when he at last entered the room below. He walked in to the sounds of an echoing pop song, wildly out of place in a room full of elderly people. Her eyes ran over his figure; a man she had not seen for so long, drinking him in. She had wondered what it would feel like. But she felt nothing. She was too far in to the killing zone to let anything disturb her. Her mind was a place of absolute quiet and purpose. Like a Zen garden, her thoughts were a series of abstract lines and sharp corners leading to one place: the target she imagined on his heart. After he began to speak; that was when she would fire.

  She balanced the rifle in her hands, testing its weight, and then put it to her shoulder where its stock nuzzled like the nose of a faithful hunting dog finding its master. She loaded the weapon carefully, slipping a golden bullet into its dark chamber. Then she squinted down the barrel, one eye closing while the other widened in anticipation. She looked down the length of the rifle and into the light below, sweeping over the stage where he stood. She aimed the gun directly at him, the notch of the sight firmly planted in the middle of his chest, forming a tiny dark cross at the center of her vision.

  She readied herself for the moment, but a sudden flash of gold behind him distracted her. She looked up over the barrel of the gun and saw a familiar head of striking blond hair.

  His wife.

  Her gaze lingered on the woman, and the sight of the gun drifted to one side. Old memories disturbed the placid calm of her mind. She thought of places far away and long ago. Of her own flesh and blood, now lost to her. She shook her head to dispel the visions and quickly bent down to the gun again. Her finger slowly tightened on the trigger, ready to squeeze the reluctant metal into life and unleash her judgment.

  CHAPTER 1

  SENATOR JACK HODGES stood in front of the crowd and smiled, his handsome craggy face cracking open like a cave in a granite cliff. The high school gymnasium was only half full, perhaps 50 or so people sitting on a motley collection of chairs. Hodges had no doubt the school’s basketball team got a bigger crowd to watch their games than his faltering run for his party’s presidential nomination ever could. The gathering was mostly Iowa farmers, coming into the town on a bitterly cold November night from their frozen fields and isolated homes in this south-eastern corner of the state. They stared at him with hard eyes, almost daring him to convince them that they should vote for him. But he expected no less. Iowa audiences were always tough. They were long immune to the constant parade of candidates trooping through the vital state that voted first in the nomination contest. Each audience knew it had the power to make or break any candidate, but to Hodges this crowd looked especially hard. His staff had told him that Mount Pleasant was a college town. They said a smattering of students and teachers would show up: a key demographic that he desperately needed to boost his anemic poll numbers. But, as he surveyed the room, he knew the biting chill had kept them huddled in their cozy dorm rooms. Only the farmers never seemed to notice the cold. They always showed up.

  Hodges waited patiently for the school’s principal to finish introducing him. He was a rotund, jolly man, whom Hodges met briefly just 15 minutes before. They had talked amiably enough, but Hodges sensed that even this man, whom his staff assured him was a locked-down supporter, was skeptical of his chances of ever winning the state. Or even that he could finish in the top five. Hodges listened to the man’s patter, skimming over the familiar details of his life, sketching out the warrior-politician meme on which his campaign pinned their fading hopes.

  “Senator Hodges is now the junior Senator from Indiana, but he has a record of serving his country at home and abroad. He was a three-star General who helped win the Cold War. He later risked his life in Iraq and served in Afghanistan,” the principal said.

  But Hodges paid little attention. He glanced backwards, just briefly, at his wife Christine, who sat on a plastic chair off to one side, looking dazzling in a white suit. He winked quickly at her and she smiled back. Hodges laughed inwardly, feeling a surge of fortune, as he became aware his cue was about to arrive. The principal was finishing up with a phrase that had become familiar but which Hodges increasingly doubted had any basis in reality. “I give you the next President of the United States! Senator Jack Hodges!” the man said, his loud enthusiasm far outweighing the smattering of polite claps from the crowd. Hodges strode forward and grasped the man’s hand firmly.

  “Thank you, sir,” Hodges said. “Good job.” Then he turned to face the crowd. He paused, regarding them with a clear expression that quieted the room. He let the silence last just a second or so longer than was comfortable, building an expectation. Then he began, exactly as he had started a hundred speeches already, all across Iowa and New Hampshire and a dozen other states. He spoke simply, and directly, his passion never wavering one iota, always opening with the same words.

  “Let me tell you how we’re going to save this country …” he began.

  But then he stopped.

  Perhaps it was the tiny but quick movement of the assassin’s head that caught his eye. Or else it was that strange instinct, shared by all animals, of an awareness of being watched, of being something else’s prey. He had fe
lt it in Baghdad and Kabul countless times. But here in Iowa? Almost disbelievingly, Hodges, his skin crawling and with the hair on his arms standing on end, squinted up into the rafters of the gymnasium.

  His eyes took a second to focus and then his mind took two seconds more to understand what he was seeing: up in the eaves a shadowed figure crouched, holding a rifle. The barrel was pointed directly at him. Even at this distance he thought he could see the assassin’s finger starting to squeeze the trigger. He felt frozen still, as if held in place by some invisible hand. Behind him he sensed Christine frown and follow her husband’s gaze up into the roof. Then she saw the figure too. But Christine did not freeze. She screamed.

  “There’s a gun!” she yelled.

  It was a sound that seemed to break a spell. The world around Hodges exploded into chaotic movement. Christine leapt to her feet, her chair clattering to the floor. He took a step toward her, glancing backwards to see the rifle tracking his movement. But now the stage was a frantic mess of running and shouting people. Hodges grabbed Christine and stepped in front of her, shoving her behind him, and he put up one arm, seeking to ward off whatever fire might come their way.

  An explosion suddenly echoed around the gymnasium with an unearthly ear-splitting crack. Hodges felt the hot, scalding breath of something kiss his cheek as it sped by and he felt a spray of angry concrete chips from the wall behind him strike his back. Then he hit the floor, taking Christine with him, covering her with his own body. He waited for another bullet; his breath roaring like an enraged bull, his heart thumping so loud that he felt it would burst through his chest. But a second shot never came.

  Up above, the assassin had dropped her rifle. She collapsed into a ball, curling up in fetal position, hugging her knees to her chest and muttering to herself something that sounded like a prayer in the rasping language she had learned at her mother’s breast. She repeated the words again and again and then thirty seconds later two overweight cops, screaming and sweating, guns drawn and ready to fire, clattered up the steel steps to her hideaway. They grabbed her and twisted her arms fiercely behind her back. One of them aimed a kick at the small of her back, crunching the toe of his boot into her spine. She fell silent now, not even grunting in pain at the blow. The two men shouted questions at her, pushing their faces into hers. But she looked away, twisting her neck in their grasp and closing her eyes as if in meditation. She did not speak again.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE WINTER NIGHT fell swiftly as the car swept along the stretch of interstate highway between Iowa City and Des Moines, hiding the gray, frozen landscape in darkness. The furrowed fields, with their deep, black earthen grooves flecked with snow, disappeared into the gloom.

  But Mike Sweeney barely noticed the change. He steered the car with one hand, while his other gesticulated in the air as he talked to the two college students in the backseat. He spoke quickly and passionately, his free hand sweeping out or thumping the dashboard. He was so caught up in his subject — Senator Jack Hodges — that he mistook the wide-eyed interest of his audience for enraptured attention, when instead much of it was fear that the car might swerve off the road.

  “He’s the real thing,” Mike said, using the pitch that he always found effective when hitting Iowa’s campuses for the campaign. “He’s not like other politicians. When Senator Hodges tells you something, it’s because he believes it. Not because some focus group has told him it’s popular.”

  The two students, a boy and a girl, nodded their heads in agreement. Mike had picked them up at Iowa State University, after addressing a small crowd too bored to go to their lectures. Mike cut a dramatic figure on the stage with his six foot tall frame and shock of close-cut red hair that made his green eyes stand out like rock pools in his pale face. He spoke for 30 minutes, without notes, stalking the stage like a lion, trying somehow to infect his audience with his own passion. Yet it didn’t really work. These two were the only ones to put down their names to volunteer and so, on the spur of the moment, he offered to give them a tour of the campaign’s Des Moines headquarters. Now they were getting the full scale “Sweeney treatment.”

  There was no doubt Mike believed what he said. He was no shallow campaign staffer, in it for the money, hopping from one campaign to another. In fact, at 29 years old, this was his first political campaign; he had abandoned his job in Florida, working with unskilled immigrants in the state’s agricultural industries, to join Hodges’ cause.

  “I’d never seen anyone like him,” Mike explained to his audience in the backseat. “He made me believe. For the first time in my life, I found a politician who actually meant what he said. So I left Florida. I figured, why help a few people struggling to get by, when I can help change the whole system?”

  He meant it too. Mike first saw Hodges speak at a fundraiser in Orlando, just a few miles from the orange plantations in which thousands of laborers existed in almost slave-like conditions. Mike only went because he thought he might make some useful contacts in his latest effort to improve worker conditions. It was the end of a long day and he was lounging exhaustedly at the back of the room when Hodges began to speak. It was electrifying.

  Hodges shocked the audience of local bigwig party donors, speaking off-the-cuff and lambasting them for standing by while their country split apart at the seams, with the rich growing richer and the poorer sinking into the mire. Mike doubted whether Hodges raised much money that night, but the candidate gained one fervent new convert. He signed up the next morning. A week later he left Florida for Iowa.

  “But can he really win Iowa, Mr. Sweeney?” one of the students asked.

  Mike turned back to look at the kid. He flashed him his most confident grin. “Not only can he win, but he will win,” he said.

  The two students looked at each other and smiled. Mike turned back to face the road, feeling mildly guilty for lying. The fact was, Hodges’ campaign was always an outside bet. The General-turned-Senator had a loyal following, but he was new to politics; he hadn’t even served a full term in the Senate yet. Established party leaders, including seven others also running for president, turned their back on him as soon as he announced his candidacy. Now, after three months of hard slog, Hodges had barely made a blip in the polls. The vastly experienced frontrunner, Virginia Governor Harriet Stanton, was still far ahead and even her nearest rivals did not include Hodges. As press coverage of the race heated up, the Hodges campaign was an afterthought to the bigger, richer campaigns, a footnote and not much more. But Mike still believed. He would never give up.

  Mike glanced at his watch. It was 7:00 pm. Maybe the latest batch of polls would show some good news.

  “Let’s switch on the radio, see if we can catch the headlines. Senator Hodges was out in Mount Pleasant today. That should have made a story,” he said to the students trapped in the backseat.

  Mike reached over to turn on the car radio, and what he heard next nearly sent the car spinning into a ditch.

  “Senator Jack Hodges survived an apparent assassination attempt today…” the radio announcer said.

  Mike slammed on the brakes. The car jolted and swerved violently and one of the students yelled out. Mike struggled with the wheel, turning it into the skid, preventing the car from veering out of control. It juddered to a halt on the cold shoulder, just as an enormous 18-wheeler swept by, its horns blaring. The wind from its back draft shook the car like a leaf. Mike ignored it and turned up the radio.

  “…Hodges was unharmed in the incident in which a shot was fired at the presidential candidate. His assailant has been arrested but not identified. Police sources say the would-be assassin was a woman and possibly homeless or mentally ill.”

  Mike looked back at the two students. They were pale-faced and scared. Whether from the news or the near crash, he could not tell.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. Then, without another word, he slammed his foot down on the accelerator, flinging the car down the highway again. Behind him, in the backseat, the
students held each other’s hands.

  * * *

  DENISE “DEE” Babineaux stood in the dingy, dirty surroundings of Hodges’ Des Moines campaign headquarters and surveyed the mess around her. The room was a pigsty at the best of times and these were far from the best of times. Piles of pizza boxes teetered like ailing skyscrapers encrusted with rust-like sauce stains. Posters and pamphlets were strewn across desks and half-full coffee cups lay everywhere. People buffeted around the room like ships caught helpless in a storm, shouting and running around in chaos. Above them all a large flat-screen TV was tuned to a cable news channel. The news anchors repeated the few known facts about the attempted assassination on Senator Hodges. Dee shook her head. The people in this room just did not get it, she thought as she listened to the volunteers talk about their shock and anger over the botched assassination. They did not understand what she did. This was fantastic. For the first time ever, the faltering Hodges campaign was big news.

  “All right, everyone!” she shouted as the top of the hour approached and the cable news shows prepared to reboot themselves. “Let’s cut the crap, stop running around like headless chickens and do some goddamn work.”

  Dee’s accent was pure Louisiana Cajun, lilting and twanging, carrying a feeling of warmth and sunshine even when it conveyed the harshest of words. The room quieted instantly because everyone was in awe of Denise Babineaux. Not only was she Hodges’ campaign manager, she was a political legend. Hard-drinking, hard-talking and with a line of insults that could cut like a razor, she was that rarest of creatures at the top of the political food chain: a woman. Not only that, but she was gay. Openly out and proud to anyone who asked. Though few cared to. She was simply “Dee”; a force of nature that defied anyone’s label but her own.