reports that Heath Connolly is a person of interest in this investigation, do you have any comment?”
“God help him if he is.” Governor Thomson waved to the reporters and fell in with his Secret Service detail and Judge Dixon as they marched towards the motorcade.
“Just right,” Dixon said quietly as they made their way to their limousine.
* * *
At 1:53 p.m., Heath Connolly arrived at the Hoover Building in the backseat of a Suburban. The political operative held up a manila folder to shield his face from the photographers and to avoid the cameras of the news media as they pulled in under the Hoover Building.
Ever since Kentucky he’d been walking on egg shells, worried that this time would come. This was particularly so when he learned that the Bishop’s men failed to retrieve the last of the evidence at McCormick’s house. When that all fell into the hands of the authorities, he knew this moment was coming.
The vice president was incensed.
The arrangement between Vice President Donald Wellesley and Heath Connolly was never one of mutual admiration or desire. Vice President Wellesley was the next in line for the Republican nomination and there were no real serious challengers for the job. Heath Connolly was the best political operator in the Republican Party, had never lost an election, was good friends with Donald Wellesley Jr. and there were no real serious challengers for the job.
Yet, while the pairing seemed like a natural combination on paper, the two men were very different.
Vice President Wellesley was a gentle man, a quiet leader and someone who didn’t believe every Democrat was evil. His career was one of building bridges, working across the aisle and being bipartisan. He believed how you won mattered as much as winning. The vice president truly believed in the nobility of politics and was willing to work with anyone who held the same view, regardless of their political convictions. There was always a way to find common ground for the good of the country.
Connolly was the antithesis of the vice president. Heath Connolly was a brawler, a political pit bull who believed the ends always justified the means. Winning was everything, no matter the cost. The political operative could have cared less about being bipartisan, he was a partisan. In his world there was no common ground. There was only the ground he’d won by pounding his opponent mercilessly into submission.
In one way it was yin to yang. In another, one man’s values clearly were not a match for the other.
Connolly lied and professed his innocence to the vice president.
The vice president called bullshit.
“Heath, you screwed us with that fiasco in the Florida Keys and all those Super PAC people. Now you doubled down on that mistake and got yourself involved in election fraud and murder.”
It was not difficult, in what was undoubtedly the last conversation the two men would ever have, for Vice President Wellesley to tell Connolly, “Get on that FBI plane to DC and don’t come back. You’re fired and if it’s the last thing I ever do I’ll see that you never work in Republican politics again. That is if you can find a way to keep your ass out of prison, a place to which, if even half of this is true, I’ll only be too happy to see you go.”
Now, he was in self-preservation mode as the car pulled underneath the Hoover Building and came to a stop by a set of double doors. His lawyer, a DC heavyweight named Vincent Chase, greeted him as he exited the Suburban. There were two conversations between them earlier in the day and they had a plan.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Think about the fact that you’re next.”
Mac took a seat next to an FBI technician who would run the recording of the interview with Connolly. They were sitting next door to the interrogation room. The interrogation room itself was visible through the one-way mirror. On the wall opposite the door there was a panel of monitors and other technical and recording equipment. The technician gave Mac a quick rundown of the equipment, cameras and capabilities of the system. In St. Paul, they had a single camera in the interview room and the monitor would be next door in what they called the box, where they could also watch the interview through the one-way mirror. This was just slightly more hi-tech. Mac thought he could get used to this sort of technology.
Mac, the technician and two other agents made small talk