The Bishop rarely involved himself so thoroughly in politics. There were candidates that he favored to which he donated vast sums of money, far beyond what was allowed by previous state and federal campaign financing laws, but always in his preferred method, indirectly, through various organizations, in manners that were untraceable. But this time around, for the presidency, the election was paramount to achieving his ultimate goal and to protecting his interests.
Governor James Thomson was a man who believed in everything the Bishop didn’t. Whether it was the environment, for which Thomson wanted to take action on global warming and move away from fossil fuels, to his promises to break up the big banks, everything Thomson proposed and wished to enact would hit at everything the Bishop had spent years building and profiting from. It was his goal to be the richest man in the world. A Thomson presidency would make his goals much more difficult if not impossible to attain.
Therefore, the election had to be won.
Nobody beyond a few people knew that he was involved and the loose ends were being tied up one by one and how it was being done didn’t bother him. The Bishop was a ruthless man and believed you could only succeed to the level he aspired by being so. You did not attain the wealth and power he had by being nice, by playing by the rules. You got to where the Bishop was by doing whatever it took to get and stay there. So Martin, Checketts, Stroudt, Montgomery and McCormick were done and gone and the Bishop wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. He didn’t have anything personal against them. It was just business.
And now the radio playing quietly to his right gave him an extremely relieving piece of news—Foche was dead.
The Bishop exhaled. Foche served him well for the past ten years and he would be missed, not only by the Bishop but by Kristoff as well. But Foche was also one less loose end to worry about. One less awkward situation to deal with, because it would have had to have been dealt with.
The question now circulating through his mind was whether such steps would be needed with regard to the St. Paul detective and his lady friend. He’d read the background on McRyan. He was a very able cop and his file screamed relentless. The man would not stop investigating as long as there was something to go on.
McRyan was a threat and he now had a partner who was equally troubling.
Dara Wire.
Courtesy of Wellesley Jr., he now had the identity of the woman who likely shot Foche and was involved in the fireworks outside of McRyan’s Pub.
Dara Wire was thirty-four years old and retired from the FBI, an early retirement not of her choice. Up until four years ago, she’d been a rising star in the bureau, working organized crime, having first worked undercover and by the time she was thirty, beginning to recruit and serve as the main contact for undercover operatives. She was becoming a top-notch investigator with an extremely bright future in the bureau.
The Bishop spent a moment looking at her picture.
Wire wasn’t necessarily pretty but she was a strikingly attractive woman, a brunette with soft green eyes and an alluring smile. Yet, he could see how she would have been effective undercover working the mob. This was especially true when he evaluated the photo of her in an extremely low-cut body hugging black dress cut at mid-thigh and wearing stiletto heels. She could do the gangster’s moll look, big hair, large breasts and copious makeup for just the right amount of trashiness. The goombas probably fell all over themselves for her.
Four years ago, Wire was working an informant in the Giordano crime family, which was operating in northern New Jersey and was proving particularly troublesome on several real estate projects on the Hudson Riverfront looking towards Manhattan. Wire’s informant was in deep with the family and the RICO case was building to take a big chunk of the infrastructure of the Giordano’s down. The investigation, and its advanced stages, apparently got back to Donald Wellesley Jr. who let it slip at a DC cocktail party, a party that included a delegation of politicians from New Jersey, that the bureau had an informant feeding information on the Giordano’s. Word from the party leaked back to the Giordano’s and after conducting their own form of internal family investigation, Wire’s informant was found floating