Part 12 (1/2)

In the back seat, Damon Kerry nodded appreciatively at the man next to him. 'Good job, Al. Nice turnout.'

Valens wore a distracted air. There was no doubt that the crowd here would be satisfactory. You tell semi-indigents that you'll pay them twenty bucks to go someplace and stand around for fifteen minutes, and you can generally get some good percentage of them to show up and do it. And since both sides did it, neither could snitch off the other to the media.

Five months ago, Damon Kerry had unexpectedly taken the primary after the two other Democratic contenders had vilified each other to death in a series of TV debates. Since that time, Valens found himself more and more coming around to the opinion that the system could be improved by simply eliminating the middle men and paying people directly to vote.

In a cynical moment - and there had been hundreds lately - he'd amused himself doing the math. He'd concluded that for about the same amount of money they'd already blown through on this campaign, they could have paid every registered voter in the state twenty bucks to go into the booth and mark the 'X' next to Kerry.

If he took the number of citizens who actually voted - somewhere near thirty per cent of California's adults - and only wanted to ensure a simple majority of fifty-one per cent, he could up the ante to nearly a hundred dollars per vote. With that kind of incentive, people would take the whole day off with pay to 'vote.' That was the way to do it. h.e.l.l, they'd even make money on the deal.

'What are you thinking about, Al? You're not here.'

The limo had stopped at the entrance. He couldn't very well answer honestly, but since that wasn't an issue with him at any time, it didn't slow him down now. A quick s.h.i.+ft of the mental gears and he was back to strategy, the campaign, life, or his anyway. 'Oh, sorry,' he said distractedly. 'Bree, I suppose. This new angle with Bree. The woman in jail.'

The television news had broken the story about Frannie Hardy only hours before, and it was already clear it was going to become large. Anything to do with d.a.m.n Bree Beaumont was going to continue to have an effect on the campaign. Valens couldn't get away from it. It had surprised Al to see how Bree had come from out of nowhere to be such a focal point in the campaign. Certainly it had never been Valens' intention to get Bree and Damon together. She had been with the enemy. But then, after a radio program they had both appeared to defend their respective positions, things changed.

Bree had always viewed herself as a pioneer against pollution. She took pride in the fact that her MTBE was really doing a great job of cleaning up California's air. It wasn't just science to her. She cared that she was doing good. She was, it appeared, altruistic. She wanted a better world. In this way, she was very much like Damon Kerry, more so than Valens could have ever imagined.

Valens didn't understand principled people at all, but these two - the candidate and the scientist - connected to each other in a big way. Damon Kerry, pa.s.sionate and personally charming, hadn't attacked Bree on the program. He'd been either smart or lucky enough to zero in on their common concern - keeping poisons out of the environment.

And what he'd made Bree do, which even Valens at the time had thought was brilliant, was direct her attention down, into the ground.

Before this one radio show, Bree's entire scientific life had been directed into the atmosphere. She had been cleaning up the air, defending how she did it. And that had kept her busy enough that she hadn't looked too carefully at the ground. She a.s.sumed, and the corporate culture in which she'd been immersed had aided the a.s.sumption, that her stuff - MTBE - in the ground would act like regular gasoline. Eventually it would dissolve or evaporate out. Reports - even scientific reports - to the contrary were paid for by the ethanol industry, by SKO. Bree considered the source, and discarded the facts.

So in her mind she had always been on the side of the angels, doing good work.

And then, suddenly, Damon Kerry had made her see it all differently. And in the immediate aftermath of that conversion, she'd been the greatest thing for the campaign since the battle of the front-running mudslingers.

But soon afterward, from Al Valens' perspective she became a substantial liability. Something personal started going on with Damon Kerry. Before Valens knew it, Bree was showing up everywhere with his candidate. Late dinners, early lunches, fundraising breakfasts.

By the time of her murder, Bree had mutated from occasional irritant to constant influence. Kerry was paying more attention to her than to Valens - giving more credence to Bree's idealistic, stupid advice than to his own campaign manager.

As the relations.h.i.+p evolved, Valens saw that it was only going to be a matter of time before the opponent's camp - to say nothing of the media - got wind of the story and used it to ruin everything he'd done. Valens had had nightmares about the headline: 'Candidate in Affair With Married Mother of Two.'

No, it wouldn't do. Bree Beaumont's death was not at all a bad thing for Damon Kerry, although it would probably be a while before he would see it.

Now, in the darkened back seat of the limousine, Kerry's face grew grave.

In the immediate aftermath of Bree's death, he'd gone into hibernation for three days. Valens had had to cancel all of his appearances, pleading a virus, the flu, something. For one terrifying moment, it had even looked as though Kerry was going to stop campaigning altogether, to give it up.

Valens had had to employ all of his wiles to get his client back on track, invoking Bree's sacred name. Bree would never have wanted him to quit. He had to hold on, and win the governors.h.i.+p for Bree if for nothing else. Fight the oil companies who had used Bree for their own evil purposes. If he didn't go on, Bree would have died in vain. All that nonsense.

But ultimately, it worked.

Now Valens leaned forward, rolled the connecting window down, and spoke to the driver. 'Peter, take it around the block one time, will you? We're a little early.'

This wasn't true, but Kerry wouldn't know that, and now that he'd mentioned Bree, it wouldn't hurt to solidify the spin. No doubt someone would question Kerry about it at the Almond Growers' a.s.sociation c.o.c.ktail party tonight, and it would be bad luck to give an answer upon which they hadn't already agreed.

Valens laid a protective hand on his knee. The message bore repeating. 'She and Ron were happy, Damon. The marriage was a good one. He had no reason to kill her. You have to remember that.'

Kerry turned his face to the tinted windows. Valens continued. 'If Ron and Bree were unhappy, she never mentioned it to you, OK? Right?'

For an answer, Kerry blew out a long breath. 'Look,' Valens pressed on, 'let's concentrate on the good news from this front. Look what's happening on the talk radio shows.'

Kerry snorted. 'I hate those people.'

'I know. I agree with you. But they don't hate you. And Bree in the news is good for you.'

Throughout the campaign, the talk radio campaign against MTBE had been one of his strongest weapons. Never mind that it was funded by Baxter Thorne's client, SKO, or that several callers linked themselves to groups that had targeted oil refineries and corporate offices with bombings and other vandalisms. Valens didn't mind terrorists, so long as they were his terrorists.

Valens patted Kerry on the leg. 'But like these folks or not, Damon, they are doing you a lot of good right now. They're getting your message out.'

'My message isn't just about gasoline additives, Al. It's about the public trust, public safety.'

Valens bit back his reply. There were worse things than a sincere candidate, he supposed. He tried to recall the great line - was it George Burns? - 'The politician's best friend is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it licked.' Instead, he said, 'Yes, of course. I agree with you. Public safety, public trust. But the public has a handle on MTBE. They're nervous around it...'

'They should be.'

'Granted. But my point is that these people are keeping the issue hot, and it's your issue. You're against this bad stuff.'

'd.a.m.n straight.'

'And the oil companies are making it.'

'To the tune of a three-billion-dollar-a-year industry, Al. When only five years ago-'

'Agreed, agreed.' Valens had to stop him or he'd go into his whole speech right there in the limo...

... about how the oil companies had gotten together and decided that hey, maybe it was dirty -burning gasoline that was causing air pollution after all. They should do a study and if that radical theory turned out to be true, they should - out of the goodness of their corporate hearts - do something about it.

And sure enough, that's what the study - draft written by Bree Beaumont, Ph.D. - had found. Gasoline wasn't burning cleanly enough. It needed an 'additive' to burn more completely away the hydrocarbons that contributed to smog. The California legislature and the US government's Environmental Protection Agency fell all over themselves pa.s.sing laws that mandated the use of this magical additive, if a good one could only be found.

Valens had to admit Kerry was good at this next part. He'd heard it from dozens of podiums up and down the state and it always played beautifully, the great American public hating rich corporations as it did.

'So guess what these n.o.ble oil companies did? They spent lots and lots of their own money developing the very additive that their own gasoline needed to become clean and efficient - our old friend MTBE.' Here, Valens was pleased to note, there was often if not always a chorus of well-orchestrated 'boos.'

After which Kerry would continue: 'And then, as it turned out - just a coincidence, my friends, I a.s.sure you - it turned out that the oil companies found that their production of MTBE, made of a by-product of gasoline refining that they had earlier been throwing away - well, would you look at that? Here's a surprise! MTBE started to bring in a yearly income of three billion dollars!'

More boos.

'Oh, and darn, they forgot to tell us one last little detail.' A moment of suspense. 'Wouldn't you just know it? The dang stuff causes cancer and respiratory degeneration. Actually, the oil companies didn't really forget to tell us that. What they did was tell us the opposite - that MTBE was nearly medicinal in its impact on human health. The air so much cleaner we'd have a new Eden. Why, read the initial reports' - again, drafts by Bree - 'and you'd almost come away believing it's so safe you could drink the stuff.

'Except for one other problem.' And here Kerry would turn his most serious. 'Except it makes water taste like turpentine. It leaks out of holding tanks and jet ski engines and everywhere else liquids leak out of. And once it gets into the groundwater, the wells and waterways of our great state, it never comes out. Never. Ever. It doesn't evaporate. It doesn't break down chemically. Ask the city of Santa Monica, which had to shut down five of its wells - that's half of its water supply - because of MTBE contamination from local corner gas stations.

'And even now, ladies and gentleman, even today as I'm talking to you, this stuff is added to every gallon of gasoline sold in California at a rate of up to fifteen per cent per gallon. That's fourteen point two million gallons of MTBE every single day.'

This statistic usually stunned the crowd into silence.