the need for fiscal sanity in the government. He was in Cincinnati, speaking to a massive rally at the Riverfront Coliseum. If northern and eastern Ohio were fertile territory for Governor Thomson, southern Ohio was lush territory for Vice President Wellesley. Connolly had looked at polling data and the metering dials from the last presidential debate. When government spending was framed as being out of control or that the government was spending insanely, the vice president experienced an uptick in the state. So, it became part of the stump speech, the democrats equaled insane government spending. Never mind the fact that under the Barnes Administration the debt had increased by another $5 trillion. Politics was perception, not reality.
Connolly stood with Wellesley Jr., just off the dais, taking in the speech, feeling the roars of the crowd of nearly 18,000, an exceptional turnout. The campaign manager felt the buzzing of the phone in his left front pocket, the burner phone for the Bishop. “Our friend is texting.”
“The Bishop?” Wellesley Jr. asked quietly, looking straight ahead.
Connolly nodded and the two of them slipped away from the dais and down a tunnel that led back to the bowels of the arena and to a locker room that was an anteroom for the campaign. The burner phone revealed a text with a message: “Check e-mail. Look at pictures. Do you know woman?”
“Woman?” Wellesley Jr. asked.
“I think he’s asking about the woman working with the St. Paul Detective McRyan. It’s a new development. Let me get out my personal tablet.” Connolly took his tablet out of his computer bag, opened up the e-mail from the anonymous account and opened the first picture.
“Dara frickin’ Wire,” Wellesley Jr. said bitterly.
“You know her?”
“FBI. Or she was. She’s …”
Connolly saw the look of anger over take Wellesley Jr.’s face. “She’s the one who … you know … like … rearranged your face.”
“That’s her,” Wellesley Jr. growled. “You tell our friend that if he can take that bitch out I’ll get him any vote he’ll ever need.”
“I’ll call the Bishop.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“There was no time for the layer cake.”
The man sipped his coffee and admired the view for another minute, considering the chaos he’d set in motion in locations not as serene as the one he now overlooked. The isolated cabin was idyllic, of course, he would have nothing less. It contained just the right touch of rustic furnishings along with all the modern conveniences the Bishop was accustomed to and needed for his business. The view as he sat at a pine table on the porch looking high out over the broad valley down to the York River was spectacular to say the least. The pallet of orange, yellow, brown and red of the autumn leaves stretched for miles, accented by the clear blue sky.
The Bishop sat at the table looking at his laptop screen, playing chess against the computer. For a man who carried the nickname “the Bishop,” he had played little chess in his life until very recently. In his life there was little time for games or hobbies. When he was a child he enjoyed playing with dominos. Not playing the game against an opponent, but rather setting them up in complex and long formations and then once complete, just ticking one domino down and making the rest fall. It served as a metaphor for his life, setting up and making the dominos fall. Running his business was his hobby, his obsession, his time playing in the sandbox. However, now that he’d started playing chess he was obsessed with it and how it mirrored his life, the moves he made and the pieces he moved around to make events occur as he wished. He’d come to the conclusion whether he was buying stock through numerous shell companies for a hostile takeover of a corporation, uncovering compromising information on an energy minister in Russia in return for drilling rights or using his proxies in Syria to continue to feed the violence and civil strife, the Bishop realized that all of life was a chess game, one move begetting another. He had the innate ability to see two or three moves ahead and he could set the trap. Often times he enjoyed the journey every bit as much as the ultimate destination.
This time, however, he was not enjoying the journey to the ultimate destination. The election had to be won, but there were loose ends imperiling the end game. The former was set to be won if the latter