Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [41]
Thank goodness three of the Supreme Court justices had dropped dead during the previous administration, changing the balance of power on the court so that it went along with whatever the occupant of the White House wanted. The Chief of Staff, long a Washington insider, had wondered on occasion if the previous President might have had something to do with those deaths, even though officially they were from natural causes. He knew that woman, knew the lengths she would go to in order to get what she wanted. After all, it was common knowledge that she’d had at least one man killed, back before she took office.
Ultimately, though, she didn’t have the metaphorical balls to finish the job of taking the country in the direction it needed to go. The conventional wisdom was that when her second term neared its end, she would declare some sort of national emergency and suspend the Constitution, thereby postponing the election and keeping herself in office. That hadn’t happened, though. She had gone quietly, even meekly, surprising everybody who knew her.
The Chief of Staff supposed the death of the previous President’s husband probably had something to do with that. He should have known that he was too old to keep up with that many mistresses. His heart had given out while he was on top of one of them, pumping away. The public didn’t know that, but the former President and a limited number of insiders did.
One thing you could say about the guy in the Oval Office now: He had the balls to do whatever was needed. The project at Casa del Diablo was proof enough of that.
“Darling, is that you?”
The woman’s voice from the bedroom made a smile break out on the Chief of Staff’s face. One mistress was enough … if she was the right mistress. Julia Hernandez was brilliant at what she did. She would have drinks waiting for him, and she would be waiting for him as well, naked in his bed. By the time she was through with him, she would have made all the day’s stress go away. He was usually so relaxed that he had to take a nap before they went out for dinner.
She was good at her day job, too, one of the assistant social secretaries in the White House. He got to see her every day, but of course, everything between them was prim and proper as long as they were at the most famous building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Grinning, he went into the bedroom and said, “Yes, it’s me. Are you ready for me, darling?”
“Always,” she said from the bed.
Yep. Naked. Just like he liked.
He must have been tired. The drugs worked even faster than usual, putting him in that twilight state between waking and sleeping where he was just conscious enough to answer every question she asked him, but too groggy to do anything but tell the truth. He’d babbled on about everything the President was planning, and when he woke up, he wouldn’t remember a bit of it except that they had made love.
Nude, Julia padded across the thick carpet of the bedroom and picked up her phone from the dresser. She started entering a text message. To anyone else who read it, the message would look even more like gibberish than the text messages sent by teenagers. When it arrived in Mexico, though, it would be decoded and brought to Enrique Reynosa y Montoya, the head of Rey del Sol.
The idiot now snoring away in the bed had been especially informative this evening. Julia smiled as she pressed the button on the phone that sent the message on its way.
She knew Señor Reynosa would be very interested to hear about what was going on in West Texas, at the place called Casa del Diablo….
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 19
Just as Alex had predicted, the citizens of Home weren’t happy when they heard about what had happened in the courtroom at the county seat. By the time she got back that evening